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THE SOUL OF THE "C. R. B." 




German thefts of factory equipment in northern France. 
Boiler-room in a factory at Chiry-Ourscamp, Oise. 



THE 
SOUL OF THE "C. R. B." 

A FRENCH VIEW OF THE HOOVER 
RELIEF WORK 



BY 

MADAME SAINT-RENfi TAILLANDIER 



TRANSLATED BY 

MARY CADWALADER JONES 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1919 






/$>^ 






'} 



Jx 



Copyright, 1919. by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published August, 1919 



SEP iu!9!9 




©CI.A529810 



LETTER PREFACE 

TO MR. HOOVER AND THE DIRECTORS AND 
DELEGATES OF THE COMMISSION FOR RE- 
LIEF IN BELGIUM AND NORTHERN FRANCE 

My DEAR Friends: 

This little book may perhaps surprise you. 
It is a true story, and accurate concerning 
your work, but in regard to your personalities 
I have allowed myself some freedom. Will you 
bear me malice if, in order to show the whole 
scope of your attainment, and to make it 
stand out clearly to our own people, I have 
simplified some of the details ? 

These details were your own selves, with 
your names, all of them. How much I should 
have cared to have known each of you, to 
have been able to distinguish between you, 
and not, therefore, to attribute to one what 
was perhaps, in fact, done by another — ^but 
what is most deeply impressed upon my mind 
was that you had but one heart, one brain, 
one leader. You offered yourselves in a body 
to starving Belgium and France, and no sooner 



vi DEDICATION 



were you freed from that task than you threw 
yourselves into other work, under your own 
flag of the stars, without giving us a chance to 
meet you and to clasp your hands. 

Do not be hard on this Httle book, because 
it is you who have written it; it is made up 
from your own official reports and your own 
narratives, added to the personal recollections 
which some of you have given me. Hunt will 
see that I have read closely his striking book 
*'War Bread," and I have also studied the 
"Head-Quarters Nights" of Mr. Vernon Kel- 
logg? ^nd Mrs. Kellogg's "Women in Bel- 
gium." I have taken my facts from you, and 
sometimes also my ideas. Si quid boni tuum, 
I have given, if not every root and branch, at 
least the sad and wonderful flower of your 
work, and from the perfume of goodness and 
of pity which it breathes my French readers 
will know the stem on which it grew. 

In speaking of you, workers of the begin- 
ning, I must do so in the same modest tone in 
which you speak of yourselves. It always 
touched us when you tried to avoid our thanks 
and when you told us how well the Belgians 
and the French in the invaded districts had 
seconded you, and how during their frightful 



DEDICATION vii 



ordeal they had proved the truth of the 
proverb ''Help thyself, and heaven will help 
thee." My dear friends, I seem to hear you 
repeating, by our stricken hearths, whose de- 
struction was written long beforehand by Ger- 
many in the Book of Destiny, the saying of 
one of our old French masters of the art of 
surgery. When his patient was cured he said 
with the modesty of a true Christian: ''I 
dressed his wound — God healed him." 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

An Evening with the C. R. B i 

April, 191 7 — 'A Franco-American drawing-room — Comments 
on the entry of the United States into the war — Moving 
pictures of the war. 

The American delegates to the Commission for Relief in 
Belgium. 

A delegate's story — His crossing — Eight hundred Germans 
on board captured by a French patrol boat. 

Berlin in the first days of the war — German theories — Old 
grievances — The ideal of domination. 

Last days at Antwerp — ^The refugees — Impressive entry of 
the German armies — ^The strength in numbers of the Ger- 
mans — Spiritual strength of Belgium and France — The art 
of Flanders — The soul of Flanders — Belgium, a bending 
yet resisting reed during the war. 

Testimony of French writers as to German thought — Mur- 
derous idealism — National pantheism — Germany deifies 
and worships herself. 

To this destructive doctrine the United States opposes her 
ideal of justice. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER II 

The Americans in the First Days of the War 78 

Their impressions of Paris — Evening scene — September 8 at 
Notre Dame. 

History of the Relief Commission — Scarcity of food in Bel- 
gium and France — First appeal to London — Mr. Hoover — 
Formation of the commission — Propaganda — Installation 
of the American delegates in Belgium and France — Their 
relations with the Belgians, the French, and the Germans 
— Discussion as to the method of relief. 

Life of the American delegates in the invaded districts — 
Forced labor — Deportations — " Punitive measures." 

Last interviews between German officers and American del- 
egates — The United States declares war. 

The American delegates leave the invaded districts. 

CHAPTER III 

With Our Friends in the Liberated Country 170 

Mr. Hoover visits Noyon after the German retreat in 191 7 — 
Journey to Senlis — Memories of the German occupation — 
The death of M. Odent — Breakfast at Noyon — ^The mayors 
of the liberated communes thank the committee for sav- 
ing the people of the invaded districts from famine — Visit 
to the liberated communes — Destruction of trees — Ruined 
landscapes — How the Germans fell back — Carrying off of 
the last men able to work, and of women and young girls. 



CONTENTS xi 



The battering-ram — Systematic destruction of villages — Old 
Eustache's story. 

The cemetery — Thoughts on the dead — ^Visit to the ruined 
chateau of B. — Impressions of the Americans — ^They recall 
their faith in justice, liberty, and peace, and oppose it to 
the idea of domination by force — How principles so differ- 
ent grew in two great nations, and necessarily came to an 
issue — Return to Noyon — Night in the forest of Ourscamp. 

Mr. Hoover goes back to the United States to take charge 
of the apportionment of food — Farewells at Havre — Mr. 
Hoover announces speedy and powerful aid from America. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



German thefts of factory equipment in northern 

France Frontispiece ^ 

FACING PAGE 

Herbert Hoover, President of the C. R. B 44 

Distribution of rations to the civil population in a 

town of devastated France 88 

Steamship South Point in the North Sea, February 27, 

191S iJ^o 

Trees cut down by the Germans at a crossroads at 

Champien, Oise 154 

Pines cut down by the Germans in the park of the 

chateau of Pont-Saint-Mard, Aisne 174 , 

Battering-ram for knocking in the walls of houses, 

found at Margnies-les-Cerises, Oise 198 



THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

CHAPTER I 
AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 

THE CONFESSION OF AN EX-NEUTRAL 



I 



T was two years ago — ^let us go back in 
order to be sure of our starting-point, and 
be able to judge how much we have accom- 
plished — ^yes, it was two years ago, in April, 
1917. That spring of 1917 weighed heavily 
on French hearts. From its outset the char- 
acter of the Russian revolution showed clearly 
that we had nothing to expect from it but 
disaster, and we were still in suspense as to 
the final decision of the United States. 

For the third time Spring, as she passed 
over the fields of France, felt her wings 
weighted down by blood. 

But one evening, in the pretty blue-and- 

gold drawing-room of our American friend, 

Mrs. Felder, the tension was relaxed; we held 

out our hands to each other cordially and 

1 



THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 



there was gladness in all our eyes — the United 
States had finally decided to go into the war. 

There were about thirty of us there, Ameri- 
cans and French; yesterday friends and to- 
day allies. These Thursday teas of Mrs. Feld- 
er's were a meeting-ground for some French 
men and women who knew America, and 
some Americans who knew and loved France. 
Writers, journalists, lecturers, professors, sent 
from one shore of the Atlantic to the other, 
charitable women, apostles of American gen- 
erosity, found there an opportunity to ex- 
press themselves and to reach each other. 

Why were we all at war ? What had caused 
it ? How had France, occupied with social 
and labor problems, and fairly fermenting 
with pacifism, been able to spring to her feet, 
all differences forgotten, and face her foe? 
Why had the United States been merely ob- 
servant for so long, watching and judging the 
blows as they fell ? 

We had much to learn, on one side and the 
other. Like Narcissus bending over his own 
image, the old peoples of the world, looking 
into the old rivers of history, saw only their 
own reflection. 

That evening Mr. William Sharp, the 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 3 

American ambassador, came in for a few mo- 
ments. I can see him now, leaning on the 
chimney-piece; his grave smile was even 
graver than usual, and his eyes, always se- 
rene, seemed brighter; they shone with quiet 
satisfaction. And, alluding to other meetings 
when we French had endeavored to impart 
to our American friends our own fervor 
of conviction, he said in his even, courteous 
voice: *'Well, the time of the propaganda 
IS up. 

The expression of his face was slightly iron- 
ical, although full of sympathy. He perhaps 
felt that our impatient zeal had sometimes 
doubted the motives of the United States, or, 
rather, had misunderstood that long course of 
serious thought during which the great nation 
had weighed its duties, not its opportunities. 
And yet, all through that autumn and winter 
of 1916-1917 our guests and our friends had 
repeated: "You will see — ^America will go 
into the war within six months" — or four, or 
three. They were never tired of making for 
our benefit an exact and almost astronomical 
calculation, to prove that their intervention 
was inevitable. 

''It will come," said John Felder. "Good 



THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 



God !" he cried, striking the table hard with 
his fist, "within three months you will see 
American regiments in France!" 

I may acknowledge now that there were 
those among us who doubted, who thought 
his words a sympathetic opinion, but nothing 
more. How could it be possible that Amer- 
ica, leaving her own rich and peaceful coun- 
try, would side with French ideals rather than 
with German realities, and would come to 
our desolate fields, where death was the only 
harvest ? Was it possible that any mere 
order could improvise an army from one day 
to the next, and transport it in a mighty fleet 
across the ocean despite the menace of Ger- 
man ruthlessness ? 

We were like unbelievers to whom a com- 
ing miracle has been announced. We hoped 
and at the same time we doubted, both hope 
and doubt springing from our infinite longing. 
Yes, America would help us — ^from afar — ^but 
would she not be like that other admirable 
neutral, the moon, which shed her light on 
our night-watches and our sorrows ? 

And yet the fateful hour had struck — Jus- 
tice has her dial as well as her scales. 

Our friend, John Felder, beamed with 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 5 

silent satisfaction. (When one speaks of 
Americans the word "silent" comes often to 
one's lips.) His charming wife, from one of 
the Southern States, offered us tea with ges- 
tures and movements even more graceful and 
rhythmical than usual, and an almost mys- 
terious friendliness shone in her eyes, while 
her little Southern feet, in their gold slippers, 
peeped from under her short black frock, 
tracing upon the carpet a suggestion of some 
sacred triumphal dance. 

As the April afternoon drew toward its 
close the scent of horse-chestnuts and acacias 
was wafted up into the room from the street 
below, together with the subdued noises of 
Parisian life in spring — ^the muffled roll of 
automobiles, bearing belated pleasure-seekers 
toward the budding foliage of the Bois, the 
happy cries of children playing under trees 
starry with flowers. A small group of us were 
leaning on the balcony, filled with new 
thoughts and, notwithstanding the war with 
all its mourning, feeling the peace of the ap- 
proaching evening, and of the great golden 
clouds sailing slowly across the clear sky; lis- 
tening to the children's voices — ^the voices of 
our hopes for the future — ^becoming less and 



THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 



less frequent as the shadows fell, like the twit- 
tering of birds in the branches when twilight 
closes in. 

Our talk was of the one great fact. Like 
all other French people, we took possession of 
it as if it had been a victory. America had 
entered the war ! The distant beautiful moon 
had come down to our bleeding earth and was 
going into battle by our side — ^but why ? 

The old butler, Jean, long past the age of 
any possible mobilization, went to and fro 
among us with his tea-tray, his thin lips 
parted in a beatific smile : he looked discreetly 
proud, Hke a family servant at a wedding- 
feast. 

"Well," said a voice, "do you believe 
at last ? America is as she was in Christo- 
pher Columbus's day — she was foreseen and 
guessed at then, and you will see that she 
will again re-establish the equilibrium of the 
world." 

It was a woman's voice, clear and full, with 
a ringing American accent. It was Daisy 
Folk — "our Daisy," as we called her, who 
had been in France for two years, one of the 
first emissaries from the friendship of America. 

And if we had sometimes doubted, she, 
Daisy, had always believed. 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 7 

Her mission lay in a little French village, 
destroyed by fire, a tiny village of Lorraine, 
on the edge of the forest of Parroy. A gen- 
erous friend had said to her, "Choose for me, 
in devastated France, the poorest and most 
badly wrecked village that you can find," and, 
as she might in former days have sought our 
most precious ornament for this same Cali- 
fornian friend, she had now sought out and 
chosen the village of Vitrimont, and was re- 
building it, stone by stone, living meanwhile 
among our Lorraine peasants. 

"Yes," said this philosopher, "the Old 
World made us, and now you will see the re- 
flux of the New World upon the Old, in 
strength, in mental energy, and in affection. 
And since you have spoken of the moon in 
referring to us, you will have the phenomena 
of the tides. You will be sorry that you ever 
doubted," she went on, "and you will see 
that, thanks to us, this mystery of war and 
death will be cleared up." 

A flame of faith shone in her eyes. "But 
it is thanks to you," she added, "that we feel 
ourselves to-day a nation. Time and history 
are the only judges who can tell how much 
each of us has given to the other." 



8 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

While she spoke I saw again the last eve- 
ning which I had spent with Daisy, in the 
rough chamber which she had improvised for 
herself in the little charred village. We had 
dined out-of-doors, under a slight shelter of 
planks which our peasants had put up for 
her, and as we talked we looked out at the 
line of the forest waking to life at the touch 
of Spring. She wore that evening a thin cloak 
of red gauze over her dark dress, and with 
her shining black hair, folded close to her 
head, her clear-cut features, and her deter- 
mined black eyes, she seemed a strangely pic- 
turesque shepherdess for her little Lorraine 
flock ! She took her violin and played an old 
tune, an air by Rameau; she looked very 
happy as she said, "I like to play this French 
music on French soil,'' while her foot pressed 
the earth as if she wished to take root. "I 
love everything in France, her past, her pres- 
ent, and," pointing to the charred and crum- 
bling stones, "the hope which springs from 
these ruins.'' And again she said: "I am 
building new houses for my good people here 
on the places where their old ones stood; they 
say I bring them something, but on their side 
they give me a treasure. I have my heart's 
desire." 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 9 

By going into the war would America have 
her heart's desire ? It was permissible to 
think so as we watched the look of rejoicing 
and almost of relief on the faces of our new 
allies. Our hosts on that April evening, who 
had seen and known the war, had felt neutral- 
ity to be an oppression. 

Just then Jean appeared at the door with 
his proud and timid smile, asking us if we 
would be pleased to go into the long room. 
There the lantern was being lighted to show 
the moving pictures, for propaganda by this 
means was one of our war institutions. We 
could not claim to have invented it, but dur- 
ing the winter those who had organized the 
service tried out in the Felders' apartment the 
films which were to give America true pic- 
tures of the war and of France. The long 
room was already full, the ladies seated, while 
the men were patiently resigned to standing 
against the wall. It was a mixed audience, 
both French and American: young officers 
and professors just returned from their mis- 
sions overseas; American nurses, of widely 
different types — some of them very striking 
in their military uniforms. 

Mrs. H. was there, in a long cape of the 
same horizon-blue as our soldiers; a very long 



10 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

veil of the same shade fell in straight folds 
from a linen band around her head, and from 
under it her hair made a golden haze on her 
brow; her full red lips smiled with the pride 
of youth; she was an archangel of nurses. 

Near her were more modest mortals. There 
was Miss D., hidden in a shadowy corner. 
*'You know her/' said Daisy. Yes, I recog- 
nized her sweet, ascetic face, with its clear, 
soft eyes. "You know," Daisy went on, 
"she has rented and left her delightful house 
and has come to France to offer herself, with 
all her resources, for war work, but don't ever 
speak to her of it, or you will displease her; 
she only wants to be an anonymous 'sister."* 
Here is a young woman journalist, much to 
the fore, who has, by her own account, mil- 
lions of readers whom she instructs as to our 
social work; she is a pronounced and redoubt- 
able feminist, and has made the round of the 
Mediterranean — Italy, Roumania, the Greek 
islands during the campaign of the Darda- 
nelles; she has almost fought, and has been 
torpedoed, swimming for her life (and for her 
newspaper) in the eddies among the wreckage 
of her steamer. She wears a Napoleonic 
cocked hat, is dressed in dark cloth of a sim- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 11 

pie and masculine cut, and carries a stout 
stick in her wiry hand. She is very different 
from the beautiful archangel, but still it is 
another form of energy. Close to her is one 
of her colleagues, a very white and meagre 
little creature, with pale eyes and a sharp 
profile; she has sometimes bored us by her 
obstinate wish to go to the front — she is cer- 
tainly thinking of it now. 

One thing always strikes us in our new 
allies: one American woman is not in the 
least like another, except for a trait which 
they all have in common — their determination 
to reach the goal which they set for them- 
selves. These birds of passage have strong 
wings; they know where they are going. 

Suddenly it is dark and silent, save for the 
sharp click of the machine; one scene follows 
another, as we rehearse, for the benefit of our 
friends in America, their simple object-lesson. 
First of all comes Alsace, and let us hope that 
our friends will trace with a finger, as children 
do, the outline of the pictures we show them. 
But, after all, what can they know of our 
mourning for Alsace and Lorraine, and of our 
just claim to them } Here is the landscape — 
forests of young pines smothered in snow. 



12 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

mountain streams leaping and bounding down 
into the valleys; villages, one just like another, 
crowding piously around their churches, cha- 
lets with their high cross-beams, and on the 
steeples and the roofs of the houses, stiffly 
upright on their nests, those faithful and dear 
friends, the storks. 

Then glimpses of the old French life of 
Alsace; the entry of the kings of France into 
Metz, and afterward into Strasbourg; other 
time-honored proofs that Alsace and France 
were one; old French names graven on the 
stones of their cemeteries. After the dead, 
the living; we see Alsatians who had lived 
through the rending apart of their country in 
1870. From its hiding-place behind the panels 
of the old wardrobe they take out the flag of 
France, which has been waiting there through 
four and forty long years; they shake out its 
sacred folds, and, almost blinded by emotion, 
they s^e it float upon the breeze of France 
over their liberated valley. We see an old 
woman, all bent and wrinkled, taking from 
its worn case the likeness of her husband, a 
French soldier killed in the war of 1870. She 
gazes on it, seeming to be listening the while 
to the deep growling of the cannon disput- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 13 

ing over her frail life and her Httle chalet, 
scarcely more solid than the stork's nest on 
its roof. And now we have the entry of the 
first detachment of French troops into the 
village; happy groups embrace each other 
under the exultant flag, and we can almost 
hear their joyful shouts. The crowd parts, 
the soldiers are drawn up in line, and General 
Joffre appears. He salutes the flag, and gives 
the kiss of France to the little Alsatian girl 
who comes forward timidly, her face shad- 
owed by her big black head-dress. 

The machine still turns, and now we have 
pictures of the war: the chasseurs Alpins in 
the Vosges, sliding over the snowy slopes on 
their skis, or leading long lines of sleds, har- 
nessed to teams of dogs who seem to delight 
in their work. On the outskirts of a wood 
big guns lift their heads as if they were trying 
to get the enemy's scent. It is an impressive 
sight when two of them belch forth their 
shells at the same moment. After a quick re- 
coil they slide forward again on their carriages 
to their former positions, and far away we 
see a terrific explosion; the earth heaves vio- 
lently upward and falls back again, while 
dense, black smoke rises slowly in thick 



14 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

spirals until it is gradually dispersed and ab- 
sorbed into the heavy air, where the clouds 
hang low under a brooding sky. This forward 
leap of the guns is like the bound of some 
huge, keen-jawed hound — ^it is equally supple, 
equally alive and dangerous — and also equally 
obedient. 

The pictures go on, one after another, until 
the sharp click of the machine gets upon one's 
nerves. Now it is a dreary sequence of ruined 
villages, wrecked churches, dead towns, deso- 
late fields; at a spot where three roads meet 
a Christ hanging on his cross is alone in the 
uptorn and deserted countryside. After that 
we have the sea — ^the Atlantic Ocean, with 
its long, slow swell. On the horizon a black 
dot appears, very small at first, but growing 
gradually larger, and followed by a trail of 
smoke; we can make out a steamer, rolling 
and pitching, but steadily going on. It is the 
Rochester, the first vessel to leave America 
after the infamous German announcement 
that every keel afloat, without exception, 
would be torpedoed. All the German sharks, 
warned of her sailing, are lying in wait for 
her under the waves, but she manages to 
elude their jaws, going on and on until at last 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 15 

she enters the port of Bordeaux, to be 
greeted by cheering, and formally welcomed 
by an official committee, largely made up of 
bright-faced girls bearing great bunches of 
roses. The young captain stands smiling, evi- 
dently amused, and shakes the hands out- 
stretched to him vigorously; we can see him 
laugh. To him the sensational crossing has 
clearly been good sport. 

All this passes quickly, with the jerky stac- 
cato movement of the cinema, and now we 
have Salonica, a white city crowned with 
cupolas, and, to all appearance, smiling and 
happy, as all Mediterranean cities are when 
seen from that enchanted sea. On its water- 
front French and English regiments are march- 
ing to the music of their bands. And now we 
are in the valley of the Vardar, and in the 
olive-orchards and under the huge cork-trees 
the big guns recoil, leap forward and bark, 
as they did under the pines of Alsace. The 
same explosion, the same black spirals, the 
same acrid smoke slowly dispersing in the 
clear eastern light; the dry Greek earth shows 
the sinuous line of trenches. How much alike 
all war is ! Always the same soldiers, in blue 
or in khaki, working at the same tasks, like a 



16 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

new order of humanity, devoted only to the 
new world-business of warfare; always the 
same holes in the ground, the same growling 
of guns, near or distant, the same proud 
groups around generals who give decorations 
to their men and kiss the flags. 

The earth is a great globe turning at our 
touch as the show goes on. Here is a crowd 
of diminutive Japanese, working like ants in 
one of their munition factories; again we have 
myriads of shells, neatly piled, while the guns 
roar over the heads of small soldiers belonging 
to a race which we used to look upon as the 
most astonishing playthings in the world, 
often diverting and sometimes mysteriously 
menacing. Now they are our allies, working 
and creating with us the mighty rhythm of 
the European War. In the little wooden 
houses, behind the paper windows, the women 
of Nippon, crouching on their spotless mats, 
follow the story of the war in the English 
newspapers. 

Now the landscape is all white; there are 
ice-floes in gray water; the sky is pale and 
cold, and again we see steamers, this time 
pitching and rolling in a heavy and half-frozen 
sea. They will land shells, always more shells. 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 17 

on the Murman coast, the black smoke 
rises lazily from the engine waiting for them 
on the little railway. And at the end we are 
back again in America; in the virgin forests 
negro wood-cutters sing as their blows fall; 
the mighty trunks, which have held their 
own against the storms of centuries, shiver 
throughout their length and bow themselves 
with a sound of cracking and rending, until 
at last they crash to the ground, as if aston- 
ished that they must die. It is war carried 
into the very sanctuaries where we were used 
to worship the silent and everlasting forces 
of nature. 

Memory carried me back to Africa. I saw 
again the wide yellow sands, the sun-baked 
fields, hedged with cactus, the stretches of 
plain where a scanty growth of corn strug- 
gled for life, the welcome groups of trees, 
so few and so beautiful that one saw them 
from afar across the rolling stretches of bare 
earth, waiting to soothe the weary traveller 
in the purple shade at their feet. In the still 
air, palpitating with heat, the great aloe plants 
lifted their fantastic flowers, as tall and reg- 
ular as Jacob's ladder; flocks of storks sailed 
by; biblical shepherds played on slender pipes, 



18 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

making a sound as thin and clear as a bird's 
call. 

Yet war is there also, arousing a people 
who seemed to us to be sunk in a never-ending 
slumber, dreaming only of the joys of their 
paradise. These scenes, as I say, were repro- 
duced for me by the cinema of my memory. 
Could it be that in those remote Moroccan 
villages, whose inhabitants seemed as igno- 
rant of the mighty drama of history as a hive 
of bees, there was weeping and lamentation 
over sons and bridegrooms summoned to the 
war in far-off France, from which they might 
never return ? Would little Ladife never see 
her Miloud again ? Was the Musulman ceme- 
tery not to be the everlasting resting-place of 
the Moroccan soldier fallen in the fields of 
the Ourcq ? And yet he wore a powerful tal- 
isman around his neck, and his old mother 
had made long pilgrimages on foot, and had 
hung bags full of prayers on the branches of 
the sacred olive-tree. The majestic Lebanon, 
which we had seen in other days bathing its 
historic slopes in the Mediterranean, and lift- 
ing its triumphant crest against the Asian 
sky — was it also shaken by the convulsion of 
war ? Could it be true that the smiling and 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 19 

gentle tribes, smoking their narghilehs while 
they waited confidently for the aid of France, 
had been forced to feel the choking grip of 
Turkey and Germany, and to suffer famine 
and death ? Was it possible that all around 
this flower-garden of the Mediterranean, in- 
tended for the world's delight, men and 
women were in the grasp of sterner emotions 
than those caused by the sudden enchant- 
ment of spring, or the heavy perfume of 
orange-flowers and tuberoses ? 

Happy are they who have seen, or at least 
imagined, the real face of our Mother Earth — 
to whom the names of oceans, of rivers, and 
of countries are not merely words printed on 
a sheet of colored paper. What we have seen 
our eyes possess forever, and can enjoy until 
all light goes out from them — and perhaps 
thereafter. 

The cinema has stopped; the object-lesson 
of the war is over; we have seen what it was 
well for us to see, as children are told as much 
of life as is good for them to know; in both 
cases the darker secrets are withheld — ^we 
have not seen death, nor even acute suf- 
fering. The lamps are lit again. There are 
newcomers, women and girls in khaki, with 



20 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

short skirts and felt hats, masculine even to 
the chin-straps. Strength, strength again — 
their eyes meet ours as frankly and coolly as 
those of young soldiers; their hand-shake is 
short and businesslike. Miss S. tells me that 
she has charge of a motor ambulance belong- 
ing to a hospital where all the staff, both 
surgeons and physicians, are women — "all 
women — ^no men,'' she repeats, with a touch 
of pride. Yes, a touch of pride — and yet I 
could not help feeling within myself a slight 
and half-unconscious resistance. I could not 
help thinking: "They may all be 'women' at 
the hospital, but there is something not quite 
'woman' in the clean-cut features at which I 
am gazing; they seem to have been turned 
out, at one stroke, by the hand of a skilful 
artist. Miss S. has the impeccable precision 
of an instrument which is well-made, carefully 
polished, and adjusted to form part of a great 
machine — ^but it is an instrument after all." 
And so we men and women look at one an- 
other; our hearts are open to a new friendship, 
we stretch out our hands — and then some- 
times, for no real reason, from the merest 
trifle, a chance word, even a glance, we come 
up against some old prejudice, some ancestral 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 21 

idea, reaching back to the twilight of time. 
In our minds we have long exalted two differ- 
ent types of womanhood — ^the woman capable 
of loving with all her heart, and the Madonna 
— each on her own altar. These modern girls 
have stepped down from the altars on which 
sacrifices were offered to women — and on 
which they were often themselves sacrificed. 
All is broad daylight in these young heads, 
full of democratic and liberal ideas, and yet 
this new type is in its turn dragging and push- 
ing the ponderous machine of life in time of war. 
"Will you introduce me to Mrs. B. ?" said 
a young French priest, the Abbe F. He wore 
around his neck the chain and cross of the 
French military chaplains, and on his head a 
police cap with two rows of braid. Of Irish 
extraction, he is to start to-morrow for the 
United States, in order to speak to Irishmen 
on^ behalf of France. He is taking down the 
names of bishops to whom he may have ac- 
cess, and makes a special note (with a view to 
his possible conversion) of a dignitary of the 
church, who, being under the influence of 
Bernstorff's agents, denounced France in the 
Catholic cathedral of New York City as "the 
sink of the world.''" 



22 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

The Irish question, according to the Abbe 
F,, does not concern England only, for in the 
United States the Catholic clergy, whose 
ranks are largely recruited from the Irish, are 
active and influential. During the two years 
and a half that American neutrality lasted, 
German propaganda had the field almost to 
itself and sowed many mines therein, trusting 
to their exploding later; there is great need of 
mine-sweeping, which is not an easy job, as 
the Germans were careful to foment the politi- 
cal and racial hostilities which have existed 
between England and Ireland for centuries, 
while France was condemned as irreligious, 
being represented to Catholic Americans as a 
light woman, who had thrown her Phrygian 
cap to the winds, and renounced the princi- 
ples and traditions of her family in order 
to plunge into vice. The chastisement which 
awaited her, according to these good prophets, 
was that of Don Juan. Her courage was not 
to be denied, but it was the courage of the 
atheist before the Commander's statue, mock- 
ing and defiant. To corroborate this verdict 
a few of our loosest novels (largely written 
for the foreign market) were distributed as 
tracts and our Puritan judges were virtu- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 23 

ously shocked. The Commander (who was, of 
course, the Kaiser) would force the atheist, 
step by step, to his death. The picture was 
easy to draw, and at a distance of three thou- 
sand miles all the complicated strokes which 
go to make up a true image are invisible. 

Just there the door opened again, and a 
dozen young men came in, one after another, 
so young that they looked like a band of 
students. After speaking to our hostess they 
were introduced to us as a group. All Ameri- 
cans, they appeared to resemble each other 
because of the look in their faces, which was 
uniformly bright and careless, with the ready 
smile of youth. They had come that very day 
from Belgium and the invaded districts of 
France, where they had been stationed for 
more than two years. 

"The delegates of the C. R. B." Thus they 
were presented to us, "C. R. B." standing for 
"Commission for Relief in Belgium," and, by 
extension, the invaded north of France. 

At that time the melancholy processions of 
refugees had not yet brought home to us the 
overwhelming impression of our invaded coun- 
try. These few Americans were among the 
first to bring us their testimony; some had 



24 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

lived for months, even for years, in our oc- 
cupied provinces, others had actually seen the 
invasion, followed the resistance made to it, 
and touched with their fingers (unable to do 
more than give a little nourishment) the gag 
thrust by our enemies into the throats of nine 
and a half millions of Belgians and French, 
which would have stifled even their cries of 
hunger if the C. R. B. had not been or- 
ganized, and had not taken up the task of 
making it possible for these people, if not to 
live, in any proper sense of the word, at least 
to endure. 

"The C. R. B.," said Harder, introducing 
himself, *'only represents initials in the com- 
plicated alphabet of war, for I don't believe 
you have read the statistics given in our big 
blue reports/' 

"No," said the beautiful archangel, "there 
are too many figures." 

"Well," said Harder, "the story of the C. 
R. B. is almost as long as the war. Some of 
us were already in Belgium when it began, 
and others came there in the first days. We 
were neutrals then, and the great and tragic 
spectacle attracted us. We had a chance to 
see the famous German organization, and 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 25 

also to see the Belgian resistance; we could go 
from one side to the other, counting and judg- 
ing the strokes and counter-strokes like um- 
pires. We had mingled feelings, but curi- 
osity and love of excitement were uppermost. 
To like the sight of combatants, whether they 
be bulls or cocks or men, is a natural mascu- 
line appetite, and so is a taste for danger. 
Besides that, we felt great pity, and we hoped 
to be able to make ourselves useful in trans- 
porting and caring for the wounded. But 
above all was the longing to see and to know 
what was happening in Europe, where the 
nations were devouring each other. I sailed 
from New York with eight hundred Germans 
who were going back to Germany to take 
their places in the army. They all looked ex- 
actly alike; they had the same sporting 
clothes, the same cassowary feathers in their 
felt hats, although they came from all the dif- 
ferent States; they all sang the same patriotic 
songs, as if they had all left the same school 
that very morning. One saw immediately 
what was meant by the German military sys- 
tem, and — since I am giving you the first im- 
pressions of a neutral — ^let me say that the 
effect was rather fine. They came, thus unit- 



26 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

ed, from large and small towns in all our 
States; from banks, factories, and shops, like 
a regiment hastening, with colors flying and 
music playing, to answer the first appeal 
of the Fatherland. Being Germans and sol- 
diers, they purposely ignored every one on 
board who was not a German and a soldier; 
the student scars on many of their faces 
made them seem to wear the stigmata of war 
already, as if they were dedicated as a race to 
bloodshed. But the war was short so far as 
they were concerned. We saw them exchange 
uneasy looks when the wireless telegraph 
crackled overhead, for they well knew that 
English and French patrol boats were watch- 
ing the liners for such passengers as they. 
One day a delegation of them went to ask our 
Dutch captain if he would not go back to 
New York. He had told them honestly that 
French and English cruisers were drawing un- 
comfortably near, and they preferred to re- 
turn to their counters and desks rather than 
take the chance of an internment camp for 
the duration of the war. I saw the delega- 
tion coming out of the captain's cabin, and 
they did not look happy. The steamer had 
a cargo for Rotterdam, and could not turn 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 27 

back. On our seventh day out the warriors 
and ourselves were waked by what we civil- 
ians thought was a clap of thunder — I was 
not yet familiar with gun-fire ! A French 
patrol boat was so close to us that I could 
read her name, La Savoie. The signal to stop 
floated from her mast, and her eight pretty 
little guns were turned on us. A French offi- 
cer came with the utmost politeness to take 
possession of us. As he stepped on the deck 
he gravely saluted the ladies, who were sit- 
ting, considerably excited, in their deck chairs, 
and this salute amused me so much that I 
made a note of it, for since the eight hundred 
Germans had started on their campaign not 
one cassowary plume had bowed itself before 
the feminine sex. 

^^The affair was soon over, and we had only 
to follow the little patrol boat as a whale fol- 
lows a sardine which he cannot snap up. 
That was our sudden entrance into war; the 
Savoie, with the eyes of her guns looking at us 
all the time, led us to Brest, and all along the 
coast of France we saw mysterious and intelli- 
gent signal-lights sending the news from one 
station to another of the capture and of our 
passing. At Brest our eight hundred fellow 



28 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

passengers, now prisoners for as long as the 
war should last, left us. We saw them going 
oflF toward the shore, still singing; song is one 
of the forces drawing them together. We were 
told that they were to be interned in a little 
Breton fishing village. 

"A few days later," Harder went on, "I 
was in Berlin, for I went into the war from 
the German end, and I am glad of it, for I 
am sure now of what I know" — and he 
clinched his hands. "In Berlin I saw the 
joyous side of war; it was a sword-dance, if 
you choose, but the rhythm was lively, if 
somewhat fierce, and I say again without hesi- 
tation that it was imposing. The joy was 
universal; every German seemed to be fulfil- 
ling his destiny. There was no need for them 
to read Treitschke or Bernhardi, whose for- 
mulas had been mixed with their mothers' 
milk and with the first meat of their child- 
hood, and had become part of their flesh and 
blood. The pride of war was ever5rwhere. 
Officers with measured tread and heads held 
high superintended the departure of the 
troops from the railway-stations, like noble- 
men who had not only the authority of their 
rank in the army but that of the ruling class 
to which they belonged. One saw the prole- 



I 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 29 

tarians of war led by its rulers — ^the proletariat 
being glad to obey and trained to enthusiasm. 
The streets were gay with banners, flags, and 
patriotic posters, the crowded theatres glori- 
fied the Fatherland and the war. To be sure, 
as the trains went off one did see women's 
faces drawn with anguish." 

*'Yes," said Daisy, "I also have seen that. 
When the war began I went from London to 
Berlin in order to take home some German 
girls who had been staying in England, and 
to bring back English girls who had been 
studying in Berlin. Germania was like an 
old mother whose sons are leaving her in 
order to make splendid marriages; they were 
sure to return to her richer than they went, 
bringing beautiful brides of high lineage." 

"We all of us felt as if we were in a pre- 
cocious springtime," Harder went on. "I 
cannot express the sensation in the language 
of war or of politics; one has to use terms 
descriptive of life, of nature, in order to ex- 
plain the excitement throughout Germany. 
The people were like bees who had been 
waiting until it was time to swarm: at last 
the earth was covered with flowers ready to 
be plundered. 

"And if one tried to talk at a table d'hote, or 



30 



THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 



in one of the private houses in which I was 
received, this first impression was confirmed 
and strengthened; collective enthusiasm is 
strange to us Americans, because as a nation 
we are independent and even self-contained. 

"Officers, professors, shopkeepers, all recited 
in the same manner their lesson from the 
Bible of War. Some had taught, others had 
learned it, but the matter was the same. The 
sacred book of their national life was open, 
and in it were inscribed their animosities, 
their claims, and their hopes. Every one had 
his own historic view of the war, if I may 
call it so, looking back for centuries over the 
life of the many little German states which had 
been in the shadow, made unhappy by jeal- 
ousies, and oppressed by unjust wars. 

" Nobody mentioned Serbia, nor the Russian 
mobilization, nor even the French air-raids 
over Nuremberg — ^the casus belli, real or 
imaginary, did not lie there. In the taverns, 
thick with pipe-smoke, we talked of the 
Thirty Years' War with rapier-scarred stu- 
dents or professors, while the foam on our 
tali beer-mugs sank down, its bubbles softly 
breaking. Each speaker was the mouthpiece 
of a Germany both strong and vindictive, 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 31 

which had been for centuries deprived of a 
seat at the banquet of civilization through 
the injustice of fate. They had long been 
metaphorically hungry and thirsty within the 
limits of Prussia; there were black pages in 
their chronicles to be effaced. During the 
Thirty Years' War, to which they constantly 
recurred, their population had been reduced 
from twenty millions to four. If you had 
seen their frowning brows and the gleam of 
hate in their eyes, the eyes of men used to 
poring over books and seeing life through the 
medium of printed words, you would have 
said that they themselves had seen and suf- 
fered in this time of misery and humiliation; 
they were like men who have been cheated 
out of their youth and want revenge in their 
later years. And then they spoke of Napo- 
leon and Jena, trembling with anger; they 
might have been the students who sharpened 
their sabres in 1806 on the steps of the French 
Legation. In 1870 Germany soldered to- 
gether the fragments of her broken sword, 
'Nothung,' or Necessity, a blade of divine 
origin. Now, at last, this sword would cut 
its way through the forest which awaited it, 
full of spring and the singing of birds. Their 



32 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

myths were always present to their minds, as 
well as their history; they thought equally of 
the Rhinegold and of the Basin of Briey. I 
saw them in their beer-halls, terribly real- 
istic and also often terribly poetic, justifying 
Truth by Fable. And with all that, biblical; 
the idea of the 'chosen people' was in their 
heads, clouded by symbolism and by the hope 
of revenge. The German nation were the 
children of Israel, chosen and cherished by 
the God of vengeance, and their vocation was 
to conquer the Promised Land. They be- 
trayed themselves without meaning to, and 
were not careful to conceal that they spoke as 
aggressors. There was no question then of 
'the war that was forced upon us'; war was 
the outward flowering, so to speak, of their 
inward growth, with roots deep in the soil 
and full of sap. War justified and explained 
itself by their convictions as to the past and 
the future. 

"The air grew blue and heavy with pipe- 
smoke, mingled with the fumes of annals and 
fables; there were long silences, while the beer 
was slowly digesting. I watched these strong, 
ruddy German faces grow more peaceful and 
almost sleepy; I'm thinking particularly while 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 33 

I speak of two professors, who gradually be- 
came kind and even sympathetic. 

"Yes, this affair of Belgium was certainly 
very sad, but one must make up one's mind 
to it. In order to build up the wonderful new 
Germany some old nests had to be destroyed; 
there was some shooting, of course — ^that was 
war; there were outcries from women and 
children and from fanatical and superstitious 
priests — ^but why did these birds, with their 
useless chirping, attempt to stand angrily on 
the edges of their nests ? Poor little Belgium, 
poor France; they gasped, they suffered, but 
they were not meant to die. They would only 
undergo a metempsychosis; the soul of Ger- 
many would replace their own. The Germans 
did not hate them; it was a case of 'Nothung,' 
Necessity, leading the German nation on. 
German politics became, in their own words, 
a 'Weltanschauung,' religious as well as po- 
litical. Sprung from the old Teutonic gods, 
the Germans laid claim to the earth, and 
their bellicose reveries were accompanied by 
German orchestras, giving them that splendid 
German music, where the most vehement 
passion is curbed by the most exact rhythm, 
and where the incomprehensible and the in- 



34 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

expressible are explained with a logic which 
borders on inspiration." 

"Confess," said Mrs. Felder, tapping the 
floor with her little golden foot at this tribute 
to German music, "confess that you admired 
these men." 

"Certainly," replied Harder. "I was not 
a judge, I was only an investigator, come 
from another planet, and this mixture of 
reality, poetry, prophetic spirit, and calcula- 
tion interested me greatly. And as I was 
then a war correspondent, I was filled with 
desire to see the oncoming of the mighty tidal 
wave. By October I was in Antwerp. Only 
we neutrals were able to see, in such a short 
lapse of time, both of the faces shown by the 
war. Brussels was already occupied, but Ant- 
werp not yet, and I was there when the at- 
tack came. At first the sound of the great 
German marine guns, as they hammered at 
the outer forts, sounded dull and far off, but 
it grew nearer and louder, until they seemed, 
like Jupiter Tonans, bent on deafening us. 
The confidence which the city had placed in 
the * indestructible' forts gave way to anx- 
iety and distress. I remembered what my 
tavern-prophets had said over their beer- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 35 

mugs. They must have been reminded of the 
walls of Jericho falling when the trumpets of 
the ^chosen people' were blown before them. 
^'The defense of the Antwerp forts was as 
unavailing as that of Jericho's walls. You 
have all heard and read of the exodus of the 
population, but I may speak of it, for I have 
not read of it, but have seen it. Ought I not 
to say, as a good newspaper correspondent," 
he added with a smile, "that I have 'lived it' ? 
But it was enough to see it, and if I had not 
been so recently in Berlin I should have had 
only one side of a great experience. The noise 
was like the cracking of a world falling to 
pieces — ^I thought of what the professor had 
said about the old nests — ^but one did not do 
much thinking. Fires had broken out on 
every side, and although our eyes were full 
of horrors we were curious to see the great 
reservoirs of petroleum burning in the red 
night. Huge black columns of smoke rose in 
the sharp October air, and billows of purple 
flame blotted out the sky. One saw only des- 
olation and flight — ^the flight of a whole peo- 
ple." . . . Here Harder interrupted himself, 
as if he feared to show personal feeling. 
Americans are always on their guard ! It 



36 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

was growing late; the windows were closed 
and old Jean's careful hands had drawn the 
blue curtains over them; the only lamp in the 
large room threw its white light over the 
turquoise-blue of the chairs; a tapestry show- 
ing a fantastic hunting-scene hung on one of 
the walls, and in the shadow its figures seemed 
to come to life; an impatient stag thrust his 
antlers into an autumnal tree. 

"Please stay where you are/' said Mrs. 
Felder, in a tone of authority, "and Jean shall 
bring tea and sandwiches if we are hungry." 
And at the same time, in her very gracious 
and feminine manner, with her sad and some- 
what enigmatic smile, she bade good-by to 
some of her guests. Five or six of us, includ- 
ing John Felder, stayed with Daisy around 
the hearth, which in this mild evening was 
full of flowering azaleas. With her light and 
measured step she went to the door and closed 
it, as if to show that we were her prisoners. 
Then she sat down, her slender hands beating 
a measure on her knees. 

"Go on," she said. 

"I obey," Harder answered, yielding with 
his young smile to her feminine insistence. 
He hesitated for a second, and then went on. 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 37 

"You know our mothers used sometimes to 
tell us of the end of the world, and what a 
noise it would make, and we sometimes 
thought of it ; but what nobody could imagine, 
and what it is impossible to tell, is the suffer- 
ing. For my own part I had no idea of what 
this war was, and was going to be, until I saw 
that exodus of poor people flying with Death 
behind them, striking at them as they went. 
On the 28th of September the Forts of 
Waelhem and Wavre fell, and on the 29th 
Fort Lierre, then Fort Koningshoyckt, and 
on the 7th of October the King, the Belgian 
government officials, and the foreign legations 
went across the Scheldt and made their way 
to the coast of France. From all the vil- 
lages lying between the forts and the city 
fugitives came pouring in with their cattle 
and their carts. They had faith in Antwerp, 
their citadel, so they camped in the open 
squares or wherever they could find shelter. In 
the evening of the 7th notices signed by Gen- 
eral Guise were posted on the walls of the 
town, to warn those who meant to leave that 
they had better start, and that those remain- 
ing should take refuge in cellars. The fugi- 
tives made for the Scheldt. Rafts, lighters. 



38 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

ferry-boats, fishing-smacks — everything which 
could float upon the water was soon danger- 
ously full, and the river, with all its branches, 
was covered in a few hours with these frail 
floating houses. 

"The Belgian army crossed the bridges, go- 
ing to the west, toward Waes; in the intervals 
between black darkness and sudden light, be- 
tween sinister silence and explosions, followed 
by the sound of crumbling walls and cries ris- 
ing from the river, the danger became more 
and more imminent. Only the imagination 
of painters has ever given any idea of such 
terrors. The boats, knocking one against the 
other, made their way heavily to the Dutch 
shore, but they could not carry all the crowd; 
there were tangled masses of fugitives on foot 
on the east bank of the river. They hurried 
along, pushing before them their carts, their 
cattle, and an extraordinary number of baby- 
carriages, laden with packages, with the fine 
Flemish babies perched on top, frightened, 
astonished, but quiet. There were frequent 
stops for a moment, and then I could hear the 
cooing and caressing murmur of the young 
mothers as they bent over these strange 
cradles of the exodus. I recognized the lint- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 39 

white hair and the placid look of the Flemish 
infants who are shown in their mothers' arms 
in pictures of the kermesses. These babies 
were just like them — fair, rather heavy and 
unwieldy, with big heads under tight-fitting 
caps. I did not then understand Flemish, and 
the mingled voices only meant to me a cry of 
fright. In the crush some mothers had lost the 
children who were clinging to their skirts: 
'Mudder! Mudder! Brennen ! Gebrannt!' 
Those were the only words at all like German 
that I could distinguish. With their flying yel- 
low hair the young women seemed to have 
around them a reflection of the flames which 
had driven them from home. The road to Hol- 
land was still bordered by its tall poplars; 
little mills on the flat fields still stretched out 
their idle sails; there were corners of the 
countryside still untouched, like an old en- 
graving which has been saved from a fire. 

"Next day was the 9th, and the silence of 
death was over Antwerp; it was a broken and 
empty shell. One heard only the howling of 
hungry dogs, forgotten in the deserted houses. 
Then I saw the great German parade, the 
tidal wave — I had missed it at Brussels. I 
watched it with the curious eyes of a neutral 



40 



THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 



and a war correspondent; it pleased me to 
make myself a judge between the irresistible 
onrush of a plethoric body which announced 
that it was cruel and unjust after the manner 
of divine nature and the little nation which 
was covering with its neutral and almost 
naked body its neighbor, France. 

"I went with a companion, an American 
like myself, to a window from which we could 
see the advancing Germans. The impression 
of numbers and force was overpowering. As 
far as we could see the same gray flood was 
spreading, uninterrupted, regular and silent, 
like all other great floods. I thought of those 
mystic words which I had heard pronounced 
at Berlin, about the 'vocation' of the Ger- 
man people, and their Mestiny.' Their day 
had come — ^they were advancing like a great 
brazen^ serpent, with all its folds uncoiled, 
slipping forward to take possession of the 
earth. In speaking of themselves the Germans 
showed their overweening pride by using the 
mighty Bible images to describe their own 
ambition. They liked to think they were Mes- 
sianic figures, but their Messiah was force. 

"Having seen them at a distance we saw 
them later close at hand, as they passed, regi- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 41 

ment after regiment, down the broad streets 
of Antwerp. Except for the heavy rumbhng 
of trucks and ammunition-wagons, the only 
sound was the heavy tramp of men's boots, 
pounding on the pavement. One gray pack 
after the other they went forward, stopped, 
turned the corners of streets, obeying the stri- 
dent orders which tore through the air Hke a 
whip-lash. 

"The whole army passed, the men and 
their complete equipment: guns, caissons, 
camions, each regiment followed by its mov- 
ing kitchen, with smoke coming from the 
chimneys. After the odor of burning houses 
we were to have the smell of German soup. 
That was meant for a humorous touch. The 
soldiers sat on the kitchen-wagons, swinging 
their legs, laughing and pretending to offer 
the unctuous steam of their meat to the closed 
windows above them. Their officers, whether 
on horseback or afoot, directed their men with 
the stiffness of automata, and this was accen- 
tuated by the unusual number of belts and 
straps with which they were accoutred. Al- 
most all had on their chests an electric lamp 
connected with a little electric battery in their 
saddle-bag, and when night fell they amused 



42 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

themselves by making its light blaze out from 
their bodies. Perhaps they thought them- 
selves modern replicas of the Cyclops, and 
that this uncommon eye was at the same time 
fabulous and original. 

"For two whole days the wave rolled on. 
Here you call the invaders Huns and Barba- 
rians, but if you had seen them as we did 
it would be enough to say Germans. It is a 
mistake to think that they are primitive 
hordes, with a lust for slaughter; with them 
relentlessness is a calculated result, methodi- 
cally taught and reduced to rule, as torture 
was in the Middle Ages. Their conception of 
war is an amazing combination of an almost 
candid idealism and a realism which is nothing 
short of voracious, and they carry it out by 
applying the same exact method to vast 
masses of men, and by inculcating in these 
masses, when they are formed into armies, a 
national egotism which amounts to a cold 
and systematic fanaticism — a fanaticism kept 
in order by a corporal." 

"When we say Boche or Barbarian or Hun," 
interrupted Daisy, "it is because we are try- 
ing to find a new name for an invisible enemy 
who seems to be everywhere, like evil or 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 43 

pain. In 1870 the soldiers and the people 
called the Germans 'Prussians.'" 

^'And when we say Huns/' said Mrs. 
Felder, "we are only giving them the name of 
something accursed; we speak of them as the 
old Egyptians did of the locusts and the pes- 
tilence — ^they are a plague." 

"Well," Harder went on, "let us say that 
they are a plague, and it is quite correct that 
their dense gray masses are like a swarm of 
fierce migrating locusts. I call the insects 
fierce because their vast numbers and their 
voracious appetites make them formidable; I 
have more than once taken two or three of 
them in my hand and found them quite harm- 
less. Our duties in the C. R. B. brought us 
into contact with some officers who were al- 
most good-natured. We had to arrange with 
them about feeding the starving people; you 
should have heard them, fathers of families 
themselves, talk genially about 'my popula- 
tion,' as if there was no cause for anything 
but good-will between the inhabitants and 
the invaders. They were only carrying out 
orders, and we felt that they would have 
shown the same zeal — indeed, they acknowl- 
edged it — if the command had been to shoot 



44 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

the same people; or else at the sound of a 
whistle, without changing countenance, they 
would have 'ordered the sack/'' 

'''Ordered the sack,'" said Mrs. Felder, 
tapping the blue carpet with her impatient 
foot, "I don't know that French expression." 

"You will find it in all the memoirs of the 
sixteenth century," said Harder, "and you 
may be sure that the Germans have neat lists 
in their files of all the sacks which have taken 
place in the terrible wars of past centuries. 
To 'order the sack' is to turn over a city or 
village to the cupidity and bestiality of the 
soldiery. The sack was ordered at Malines, 
at Louvain, and at Aerschot. Those who gave 
the abominable order did not themselves carry 
it out, and those who did could always plead 
that they were obliged to obey, and in this 
way the German theory of collective irrespon- 
sibility was upheld." 

"But then," said Mrs. Felder, "if they are 
going to search through old books to find 
examples of cruelty in the past, they might 
just as well burn women as witches, or con- 
demn people to the stake if they happen to 
hold different opinions." 

That is pretty nearly correct," Harder 



(6' 




Photograph copyright by Underzcood and Underwood. 

Herbert Hoover, President of the C. R. B. 

(Commission for the Relief of Invaded Belgium and France.) 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 45 

answered. "It is perfectly true that if we 
look hard enough we can find justification for 
almost anything in some old record or other/' 

"Let us go back to the locusts/' said Mrs. 
Felder, "and tell us more about them. 
When once they had descended on Belgium, 
did they eat up all the food there was?" — 
and she spread out her fingers nervously, as 
if to avoid touching the insects. 

"Exactly/' answered Harder, looking at 
his excited questioner with the characteristic 
little smile which drew up the corners of his 
lips. "And that is where the story of our 
C. R. B. begins/' 

"Oh, but we don't want to hear it yet," 
cried Mrs. Felder. "We want more of your 
confession as a neutral, that is much more 
interesting this evening. We want to know 
what you thought of the Belgians after you 
had seen the people whom you call Germans, 
but which I shall continue to call Huns, Bar- 
barians, and locusts." 

"Ah," said Harder, "that's a long story, 
and I'm afraid I shall be obliged to speak of 
the C. R. B., for without it there would have 
been no more Belgians — ^they would have been 
exterminated by famine. And since we have 



46 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

mentioned old forms of torture, I may say 
that Belgium and the north of France were 
confined in an iron cage; the Germans held 
the padlock, and nothing could get through 
the bars, not even a letter or a bit of bread. 

"Draw a line around the front, extend it 
along the length of the German frontiers, and 
within it you will have the prison district of 
the war. Almost no one was allowed to enter 
or to know it except the delegates of the 
C. R. B., and within that circle of steel ten 
millions of living souls asked themselves every 
day the heart-sickening question: 'Shall we 
die of hunger?' Supplies arrived constantly 
from Germany for the troops, but they were 
sacred; they were to feed the chosen people, 
the armies of the Lord of Hosts. Not a 
grain of German wheat went into a French or 
Flemish mouth; we were only able to arrange 
that the inhabitants should have what was 
grown on their own soil. You may imagine 
how much could be raised in an invaded coun- 
try, and on ground over which the German 
armies marched forward and back all the 
time. In Belgium the armies moved on, but in 
France they remained and grew ever larger; 
millions of combatants overspread the occu- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 47 

pied provinces. How the French managed to 
keep alive until our food supplies could reach 
them must remain one of those mysteries of 
French vitality to which we are only too apt 
to apply the comfortable word 'miraculous.' 
"Belgium was the first to suffer; the first 
requisitions squeezed her dry. Her industrial 
riches were very great, but for that very reason 
she did not produce much; she was a factory 
hand, buying her bread instead of baking it. 
All the Belgian industries stopped at once. 
The miners no longer went down into the 
bowels of the earth and in a few days the 
evil of enforced idleness was added to all the 
others. It is true that Germany suffered, or 
was going to suffer, from the blockade, but 
she put her utmost energy into making the 
most of her resources, and at the same time 
she exhausted or ruined the territory which 
she had seized. At one time she asserted the 
right of the strong when she requisitioned 
supplies, and at another she pleaded weak- 
ness, in order to get out of dealing with the 
food problem. The argument was simple; 
since England had blockaded her ports Ger- 
many was like the garrison of a besieged for- 
tress; she had barely enough for herself. It is 



48 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

true that she opened stores for the sale of pro- 
visions, but only Germans were allowed to 
enter and buy, and in the autumn of 19 14, as 
the unemployed Belgian workmen stood in 
line waiting their turn at the municipal can- 
teens, they could see piles of sauerkraut and 
garlands of sausages behind the brightly 
lighted windows of the German stores. But 
these delicatessen w^re not for Belgians. They 
were, it is true, helped by their own country- 
men — ^landowners, bankers, merchants, man- 
ufacturers — all the rich Belgians, to sum them 
up in a word. And they were splendid; they 
led their people through the desert, as Moses 
did the Hebrews of old. You know how much 
civic pride this little Belgian nation has al- 
ways had. It is a historical tradition with 
them. 

"At Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Malines, 
Liege, and other towns, down to the smallest, 
well-organized charitable associations were in 
existence long before the war, supported and 
harmoniously administered by members of all 
classes and creeds, nobility, bourgeoisie. Cath- 
olics, and liberals. Therefore, when it became 
necessary, their canteens and soup-kitchens 
were speedily enlarged, in order to give relief 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 49 

to the ever-increasing number of the unem- 
ployed. And when I use that term I do not 
mean only factory hands and miners; the in- 
vasion stopped a whole population short in 
whatever work it was doing, whether profes- 
sional or manual. 

"It was not only the working classes who 
suffered, but out of respect for the misery 
which shrinks from notice I will say no more. 
Conditions were entirely different from those 
of a strike in time of peace, for which a work- 
man or artisan might be supposed to be more 
or less prepared. In many cases the man was 
in the prime of life, and usually the father of a 
large family. He lived in one of those Belgian 
villages which we can all remember, with little 
houses pressed close together beside the broad 
highway, each with its glossy roof, shining 
windows, and tiny garden gay with holly- 
hocks, geraniums, or tulips. These houses rep- 
resented Flemish cleanliness, healthfulness, 
and a certain amount of leisure. What was the 
daily life of the families who lived in them ? 
Early in the morning the father went off to 
his work in factory or mine by one of the little 
tramway lines which held the industrial life of 
Belgium together. His wife, the 'housewife,* 



50 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

who had also been up since daylight, pulled 
her provision of vegetables from the little gar- 
den and prepared the soup. Milk, eggs, and 
meat were all reasonably cheap, and the 
chubby children could have their fill of thickly 
buttered bread. Clothing was warm and shoes 
substantial; life in Belgium had long been com- 
fortable, and the winters, with their gray skies 
and steady rains, made comforts necessary. 
To be prosperous was the national habit of 
Flanders. If Flemish art is redundant, giving 
us a picture of national manners which is al- 
most always gay, and sometimes overvigor- 
ous, it is not from any tradition or preference 
on the part of the artists. These rollicking jun- 
keters of Teniers, with their rubicund noses; 
the crowds at a kermesse pressing around a 
table piled with succulent victuals; the shouts 
of laughter which we can almost hear, the uni- 
versal jollity — all show the delight in life of a 
healthy and well-fed people. 

*'I remembered all that as I watched the 
Belgians of to-day, menaced with starvation 
as if they were so many famine-struck Hin- 
doos. At Antwerp especially, when I saw the 
unemployed workmen standing on their door- 
steps still smoking their pipes but with their 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 51 

hands hanging idly at their sides, I thought: 
'These are of the same race as the men who 
saw Rubens.' The signs of suffering had al- 
ready begun to show; their clothes hung 
loosely on their stout bodies, they dragged 
their feet as they walked, and their eyes were 
dull and listless. The 'rich,' the masters of in- 
dustry, had ceased to be able to support the 
soup-kitchens and canteens. It was no longer 
a question of money; the circle had closed 
around Belgium, and her stores were used up. 
The time had come when it was absolutely 
essential to make an opening through which 
foodstuffs could come, no matter how much 
they cost. I will not tell you how we managed 
it, for that would make me talk too much 
about ourselves," he said, looking at his com- 
panions. "The Germans were always ready to 
explain just why they had gone to war. The 
Belgians said little, but, as we shared their 
imprisonment, we grew to appreciate the no- 
bility of their resistance and the extent of 
their sacrifices. We remembered their past 
history, with its obstinate struggles for free- 
dom; we saw the glorious records of their 
national art in the churches and the Hotel de 
Ville of Antwerp, and understood as we had 



52 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

never done before what an inspiration it is to 
a country to have been capable of producing 
great art. It is rather characteristic of us 
Americans," with another glance at his fellow 
countrymen, "and a curious and enlightening 
experience, to begin to know a country through 
its art. When we go to Europe we have already 
in our minds an idealized consciousness of 
what your old countries gave to history while 
we were yet unborn, and we are even more 
acutely aware than you are, if you will allow 
me to say so, of how great a part so small a 
country as Belgium has had not only in rpak- 
ing history but in adding beauty to the world." 

"Belgium is like a little shell which has pro- 
duced a splendid pearl," said Daisy. 

"Indeed, yes," said Harder. "Of course I 
was obliged to admire the German armies and 
the German administration, but this pearl, 
gleaming with the iridescence of centuries, 
which they wished to crush, seemed to me in- 
finitely more beautiful and precious. I loved 
Antwerp, and as I wandered about its old 
quarters I thought all the time of Rubens, for 
Antwerp is his city. Four of his large engrav- 
ings hung on the walls of my father's study, 
and he also had many prints in portfolios. 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 53 

When I was a schoolboy, many a time he 
showed and explained them to me during the 
long hours of orthodox Protestant Sundays, 
and as he passed his fingers in a light caress 
over their flowing lines I could hear him say 
to himself: * There is nothing greater/ That is 
one of the memories of my childhood. 

"At the time I did not know just what he 
meant, but when we are grown we understand 
what in childhood we only feel. I hope I shall 
not offend my compatriots by saying that 
there is not much artistic beauty in America; 
we are, therefore, all the more appreciative of 
whatever brings us, from afar, visions which 
are lacking in our daily life. I was especially 
attracted by Flemish art because it could be 
either dashing and impetuous or tenderly sim- 
ple and homely; and the Belgians whom I saw 
overwhelmed by misfortune were not to me 
only a small nation almost annihilated by 
heavy artillery, as ants might be by a heavy 
foot; they belonged to a people who had had 
a soul, and who had it still.^' 

"What do you mean by their 'soul' ?" asked 
Mrs. Felder. 

"The soul of a people,'' said Harder, "is 
that spirit which enables them, whether great 



54 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

or small, to create something which is their 
own, and only theirs. If a nation has done that 
it acquires thereby a grandeur, in a spiritual 
sense, which is a sort of consecration." 

"It is true," said Daisy, "that we speak 
more often of the soul of a small nation than 
of a greater one — ^we say 'the soul of Greece' 
more often than 'the soul of Rome.'" 

"That is because a great nation," said 
Harder, "has usually absorbed various con- 
flicting elements which have tended to hamper 
the development of its particular spirit. But 
at every turn we felt the soul of Flanders, and 
we who come from vaster countries, where we 
have been used to space and strength, cannot 
fail to respect, and I may even say to venerate, 
the spirit which has labored so diligently and 
has given so much beauty to the world. Those 
long lines of unemployed Belgian workmen 
waiting in the freezing dusk of autumn and 
winter for the soup doled out to them by 
charity — ^how unutterably dreary they were ! 
I watched them often, and recognized the 
same quality of flesh, the coloring of skin, the 
shades of fair hair, the glistening eyes, which 
have been fixed in our minds forever by the 
power of a great art. . . . One more recol- 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 55 

lection — it shall be the last. It is of a winter 
evening in a church at Antwerp. A group of 
women and children who had taken refuge 
from the cold outside were huddled close to- 
gether, reciting the rosary before an image of 
the Virgin. A cluster of burning tapers made 
a zone of golden light around them among the 
icy shadows of the church, revealing at the 
same time a large altar-piece of the Nativity 
by Van Eyck. Little trembling flames threw 
their uncertain gleams over picture and wor- 
shippers, and I scarcely knew which Belgians 
were painted on the canvas and which were 
kneeling on the cold marble, cheating their 
gnawing hunger by reciting the rosary in 
Flemish with their patient voices. It was noth- 
ing, if you like — only the impression of a mo- 
ment. But when one has felt such impressions 
every day, at a time when the question 'to be 
or not to be' is pressing on a whole nation, one 
comes to understand that such a people, from 
what they are themselves and from what their 
history has been, have a reason and a right to 
live. Their claim to justice shines from the 
eyes of the smallest and humblest — ^those soft, 
frank eyes of the Belgian children. Of course 
as a liberal and a neutral I knew this before- 



56 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

hand, but when I came to Hve among those 
defenseless, silent, patient Belgians, my knowl- 
edge became less abstract." 

"'It is certainly true," said Daisy, "that 
there is one lesson which we Americans can 
only learn in Europe, and that is how much a 
country stands for which we call 'little,' but 
which has a long past behind it to which it 
has been true. You have learned that in Bel- 
gium, and I am learning it in France. In fact," 
she added with an amused smile, "I learned it 
in one day in my little Lorraine village." 

Harder bowed with slightly ironical cour- 
tesy. "Women always learn so much faster 
than men." And then he added seriously: 
"You ladies are inquisitive. You want to know 
what are the impressions of a man who has 
spent two years and a half among the Ger- 
mans, having been thrown more particularly 
with their officers, the famous German 'organ- 
izers,' and also among the Belgians. Let us 
put it that he has known what are at present 
the victors and the vanquished. His impres- 
sions must necessarily be complex, and at 
times even puzzling. It is true that we admired 
the German army as it flowed past us, appar- 
ently as inexhaustible as a mighty river, but 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 57 

at the same time our hearts were filled with 
admiration of a different sort for the Belgians. 
In reading the other day an old volume of 
Montaigne which belonged to my father, I 
came across a sentence which reminded me of 
what the neutrals felt who were shut up in the 
invaded districts with the Germans. Mon- 
taigne said, playing with an intellectual truth 
in his liberal fashion: *I could readily find 
myself at home among those who have a mind 
to light one taper to the Virgin and another 
to the Dragon.' The dragon, the brazen ser- 
pent, was splendid in his pride when he came 
down from the heights upon Waelhem, Con- 
tich, and Waerloos, raising clouds of dust and 
spreading abroad his infernal odors of sulphur 
and naphtha. Hell must smell like burning 
villages. Our hearts were wrung with pity 
for the Belgians, but they were as little hunted 
animals beside the great Beast, and the Beast 
was a magnificent monster." 

"So that day," said Daisy, "the taper 
would have been lighted for the Dragon ?" 

"Well," answered Harder, "if I must con- 
fess the truth, I will admit that on that day 
the dragon would have had his taper." 

"What was it made you feel most for the 



58 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Belgians?" went on Daisy relentlessly. "Was 
it that you admired their moral strength or 
that you pitied their weakness ?" 

"I can answer you/' said Harder, "in the 
words of old Montaigne. The next taper would 
be for the Virgin with her sandalled foot upon 
the Dragon's head. And now it is my turn to 
ask a question : Which do you admire most in 
the little virgin, her strength or her weak- 



ness ?'* 



If the little virgin with her soft eyes and 
fair hair is Flanders," said Mrs. Felder, "we 
will fall on our knees to light her taper, which 
is more than Montaigne thought of doing." 

"Very true," said Harder, "but Montaigne 
was not thinking of Belgium. What we may 
be sure of is that the resistance of a small and 
weak nation, whose very life is threatened, 
who is dragged to the pillory because she dares 
to say, ' I exist and I have a soul,' has a sacred- 
ness to which mere strength can never attain. 
Belgium confessed her belief in herself. She 
was like the bending reed — ^but a reed en- 
dowed with the power of thought." 

"When I was among them I often thought 
of the blatant manner in which the Germans 
proclaim their 'biological superiority.' It is 



AN EVENING WITH THE C, R. B. 59 

a well-known theme, the leit-motiv of the war. 
They reason like naturalists, as if we human 
beings were governed by the laws of the ani- 
mal world, in which one species preys upon 
another, from the highest to the lowest, in a 
sort of hierarchical progression. How many 
times, after our conversations with the officers 
who went with us on our rounds of inspection 
as delegates of the C. R. B. I asked myself 
the question which they have answered so 
boldly, and one day I said to one of them: 
*But look here — after all, you know, we are 
not insects.' 

"Is the history of nations really no more 
than what we call natural history ? That is 
their war dogma; they have framed it upon 
the cruel laws of nature, and by a strange and 
inadmissible contradiction they constantly 
call upon God to carry out a plan from which 
the very idea of God is left out." 

"That is because they give to their leaders," 
said Daisy, "the manual of the materialist, 
and to their people the gebetbuch of the pietist. 
I have seen these little gebetbuchs of the Ger- 
man soldiers; little black books, all alike, 
picked up in the trenches, stained with blood. 
They would be touching in their fervor of 



60 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

obedient love toward the Kaiser and their 
princes if one did not know that the * military 
caste/ as you say, had composed them as a 
sort of drug, a pious elixir to sweeten the sol- 
diers' sacrifice." 

"You have seen the gehethuchs^^ said Har- 
der, " and when we were rolling in motor-cars 
along the roads where the lines of dead vil- 
lages stretched out like a street of tombs, I 
have often seen German officers take out of 
their pockets noxious pamphlets in which 
these theories of biological superiority were 
presented in various forms, sometimes the 
most unexpected, in order to justify destruc- 
tion and ..." 

And cruelty," said Mrs. Felder. 

They made us read these new gospels, and 
we discussed them; it was interesting to under- 
stand them and to be allowed to hear them 
explain their inmost convictions coolly, quiet- 
ly, and almost intimately. A little German 
hauptmann who has that cerebral dynamite in 
his pocket will burn a city, and make a bon- 
fire of the old books of Louvain as unconcern- 
edly as he has seen his father smoke out a 
swarm of bees. The honey of the world has 
been made in order that Germany may enjoy 



(6 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 61 

it. You know their formula — ^you have heard 
it a hundred times. Their might gives them 
the right, and the right of others is subject to 
perpetual revision by this might of theirs. 
But I do not want to weary you with these 
axioms, which are old stories here; they only 
surprised us Americans so much because our 
own national structure is so liberal." 

He went up to the large rosewood bookcase 
in front of which a row of little green baskets 
of various shapes, made of Indian grasses, 
gave out their strange scent, and, taking out 
a volume, said: "I saw this book, which I 
have read. Don't be afraid, I will only read 
one line, the first, because I have often ap- 
plied it to myself. Here it is. Heine says: 
* Formerly the most complete ignorance ex- 
isted in France in regard to intellectual Ger- 
many — an ignorance which was disastrous in 
time of war.'" And he shut the book quickly, 
as if in fear of being caught delivering a lec- 
ture. "This book is now nearly eighty years 
old, and I don't know that we have made 
much progress since. We did not know how 
Germany had come to put herself in the 
place of God, to deify and worship herself; 
her appetites are only a manifestation of her 



62 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

strength. She is the Old God, to be sure, but 
still she is God, the living God, whether 
pervading the German army, or in the gebet- 
buchsy the biological pamphlets, the history, 
philosophy, and poetry of Germany, in the lit- 
tle blue flowers which bloom in every German 
heart — even down to German beer in German 
stomachs, and the imposing number of the 
herds of German hogs on their farms. It is 
part of the religious training of every German 
to worship Germany in his own person, and 
Germany worships herself in each of her 
creatures." 

"Then in that case," said Daisy, "it is a 
sort of national pantheism .?" 

"Yes, more or less," answered Harder. 

Daisy went on: "But where did this doc- 
trine originate ? Did the philosophers make a 
nation of fanatics ? Or did ambitious political 
leaders make use of the philosophers .?" 

"That is hard for me to answer," said 
Harder. " It is an old secret of national chem- 
istry, which has been working itself out slowly 
through the ages. We did not know Germany," 
he repeated sadly. "She was protected against 
us by her nebulous philosophy, which we be- 
lieved to be entirely speculative, as a beast of 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 63 

prey is protected by the mystery of the jun- 
gle. Remember the many university centres 
throughout Germany; I am inclined to think 
that it was there, among those purely intel- 
lectual surroundings, that this doctrine was 
born. Even the most savage idea seems inno- 
cent while it is only an idea, a sort of violent 
exercise of the mind. And for all their self- 
worship there was much that the Germans 
failed to understand. They had their rich 
poetry, their incomparable music, their his- 
tory, so old that its beginnings were lost in 
fable, their language, which eluded us even 
when we thought we understood it, in which 
we pursued a thought, a verb which hid itself 
away, or an idea which burrowed in the earth 
like a mole before we could grasp it. Ah,'' said 
Harder, stamping his foot, "we were not able 
to fathom them. They lived within them- 
selves; what they did not understand they 
ignored, not only from lack of comprehension 
but from pride. They were self-sufficient, self- 
adoring. It was a sort of metaphysical perver- 
sion, and, as they are practical, they proceeded 
naturally from brutal metaphysics to brutal 
deeds.'' 

"And that was the way," said Daisy, "in 



64 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

which 'Weltanschauung' became 'Weltzer- 
stdrung/ " 

She spoke In a pedantic tone, and Harder 
looked at her with surprise. ''Some ideas can 
only be expressed in the language which cre- 
ated them/' she said. "I have never tried to 
translate that word 'Weltanschauung/ so fa- 
miliar to all Germans, and when one pro- 
nounces it one must look as though one under- 
stood philosophy." And speaking again in her 
natural voice she added: "All of which re- 
minds me that I read the other day a letter 
which is very old now, from a traveller who 
was young when it was written. The date was 
1 84 1, and he was twenty. He had gone to 
make a poetic and philosophic pilgrimage to 
Heidelberg, standing among its lime-trees on 
the bank of the Neckar. He loved German 
poetry and German thought, and he wanted 
to drink them at their source, but in writing 
to his friend Quinet he spoke with bitter dis- 
illusionment of the 'murderous idealism which 
fills this country with phantoms.' He went to 
lectures given by peaceful professors in spec- 
tacles, and heard them say that 'life had 
withdrawn from France, and had entered into 
the Germanic body.' " 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 65 

"Notice those words, 'the Germanic body/ " 
said Harder. "'For a long tinie they have ex- 
pressed what was the greatest aim of the 
nation." 

"This traveller, who was a friend of my 
family, deHvered his letters of introduction to 
certain hospitable families. He was invited to 
dine, and after evenings of intimacy during 
which (as with your professors at Berlin) the 
sincere convictions of his companions came 
out with the smoke of their pipes, he wrote 
again to his friend: * German society has be- 
come a mob of fanatics.' '' 

"Society!" said Harder. "You see the 
poisoned current, coming from far oiff, did not 
slacken. Society," he repeated, "that is to say, 
the company in the drawing-rooms and sitting- 
rooms of the little German ladies, the women 
whom we praised as candid and naive Char- 
lottes and Gretchens, with neatly braided 
tresses and eyes like forget-me-nots; society — 
the poets, the musicians, the young officers 
who danced with the Charlottes to the lan- 
guid and enchanting rhythm of the German 
waltzes; a mob of fanatics ! I can understand 
it — and I too," he went on, "have seen in old 
portfolios the correspondence of French fami- 



66 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

lies; only a few days ago I was reading some 
letters of a Frenchman, also written from 
Heidelberg, but this time the date was 1870. 
His notes, intimately jotted down, are inter- 
esting. He came and went, he asked questions 
and talked, without any misgiving, and was 
disagreeably surprised one evening, when he 
had been invited to dine and hear his hostess 
sing some 'lieder,' to receive a stunning blow 
from his host. The war of 1870, which fell like 
a thunderbolt in France, was part of the 
every-day thought of the 'intellectuals.' It 
bubbled up in their talk like the froth in their 
beer-mugs. And, oddly enough, it was the 
'intellectuals' in other parts of Europe who 
refused to believe that there could be a war 
until it had broken out. There was a contra- 
diction of ideas; the German brain had been 
pursuing a dream for a century — and when 
Germany dreams, it is a nightmare for the 
rest of the world. 

"It was a dream which was misleading, be- 
cause with your thinkers, as with ours, intel- 
lectual speci Nations are disinterested. Your in- 
tellectuals rejected the idea of war, while the 
German intellectuals were hatching it. French 
thought is universal; in a certain sense it is 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 67 

Catholic; German thought had become schis- 
matic; it was only German. ... I remember 
my father's love for Germany; he also would 
willingly have gone there on a pilgrimage. He 
knew nothing of Germany except her poetry, 
and when he was tired, at the end of a hard 
day, he would take up his Uhland and his 
Schiller. When he said 'Germany' it was with 
a pleased and restful smile. It seemed to me 
that he thought of her as an old goddess who 
was very close to nature, full of legend and 
of song. . . . But those who made the pil- 
grimage and brought flowers to the old god- 
dess only found her high-priest, who explained 
her divine right to devour mortals." 

"I can give you another saying of a French- 
man," said Daisy. "He was not altogether an 
intellectual, but rather a man of action, a 
diplomat who has still a hard task on his 
hands. I met him just ten years ago in a draw- 
ing-room; I can see him now, standing up to 
take his leave; I was astonished to hear him 
say in a grave tone, and as one speaks who 
has authority: 'You may believe me when I 
say that Germany is advancing upon France 
with the weight and regularity of a glacier.' 
I was much struck by the impression of 



68 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

amazement, and, if I may say so, of fatality, 
which these words left upon their hearers, 
when spoken so gravely by a man whose 
whole business in life was to know what was 
happening in the world/' 

"If we look back from one landmark to 
another, across wide intervals, we may per- 
ceive that it is as if an illness had been com- 
ing on for a century, or even longer; it would 
be interesting for a political physician to fol- 
low its course more closely. He could distin- 
guish forces made from a combination of pride 
and humiliation. If we look back now on these 
premonitory symptoms, it is because we have 
had but little time for psychological study 
during the last two years and a half spent in 
France and Belgium as guests of the Germans. 
Now that America has come into the war it 
will be our turn, and good for us to think 
things out and to look our enemies dispas- 
sionately in the face; I say dispassionately, 
because the more calmly we undertake this 
war, being aware in our inmost consciousness 
of the formidable thrust against which we are 
prepared to throw our weight, the stronger we 
shall be, and the more fruitful, therefore, our 
aid. If only we could also look in the same 






AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 69 

way at Germany — ^if we could see into the 
depths of her mind !" 

"Tell us something, Mr. Harder," said Mrs. 
Felder quickly. "You said that you had been 
in 'a tragic engagement.' Did you see any 
atrocities ?" She looked at him with her wide- 
open eyes; they were gray, flecked with gold, 
reminding one of the hush and mystery in the 
great eyes of nocturnal birds. 

I have seen — ^we have seen," said Harder, 
the atrocity of a system. But remember that 
saying of Macbeth's: 'I have supped full with 
horrors.' Now that our country is going into 
war our sight must not be obscured by blood. 
I have been a neutral, a neutral who was 
obliged more than once, in order to do his 
duty, to be blind, deaf, and dumb. We were 
only hands, which had to be steady in order 
to distribute food intelligently in districts 
threatened day by day with starvation. If we 
had seen what we were not meant to see, said 
what we were not meant to say, heard what 
we were not meant to hear, our mission would 
have come to an end at once." 

"But hands speak sometimes," said Mrs. 
Felder, looking at Harder with her mysteri- 
ous eyes. 



70 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

''Now Nettie Bell/' said Daisy, speaking of 
Mrs. Felder by her Christian name, "is going 
to make us guess one of her riddles/' 

"Not at all/' said Mrs. Felder impetuously. 
"Mr. Harder," she repeated in an even voice 
and with a quiet smile, "don't you remember 
the hands — I think they were invisible — ^which 
traced certain words on a wall — and old Bel- 
shazzar trembled when he saw them. The 
words were written in letters of fire — I remem- 
ber that when we had that lesson in our Bible 
class we had to underline those words, 'in 
letters of fire.'" And she raised her hand, with 
its shining nails, and made the gesture as if 
writing in the air. 

"We Americans, we are going to write those 
words!" she said. Taking from one of us a 
lighted cigarette, she repeated her gesture as 
if writing on the blue-silk wall of the room. 
"In letters of fire," she said again passionately. 

The quick light way in which she moved 
and her short black dress shadowed with airy 
tulle made her look almost like a spirit her- 
self. "Well, Mr. Harder," she said, "now that 
you have supped full with horrors you are 
going back to the United States." 

"No," said Harder, "my travelling is over; 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 71 

and he added in a lower tone, blushing a little, 
"I am going to join the colors. We are not free 
to speak; a whole people is still there, hostages 
for any imprudent words, but fortunately we 
may fight/' 

"You are going to join the army? Well, 
then, I am going to sing," she said in a whim- 
sical tone, yet her voice sounded as though she 
were making an effort to refrain from tears. 
She opened the piano and her hands wandered 
over the keys in vague harmonies. Then she 
began to sing under her breath a strain which 
began uncertainly, as if stammered in a dream, 
and then suddenly developed into a song which 
filled the room with what seemed the monoto- 
nous and piercing cry of a child wakened from 
its sleep in a night of terror. 

It was the "Christmas of the Belgian Chil- 
dren," by Debussy. She went through it with- 
out accompaniment, standing up. All at once, 
with one of those rapid and rhythmical move- 
ments which always suggested dancing, and as 
if she were made nervous by being looked at, 
she turned off the electric light and finished 
her singing in the dark. There was nothing to 
be seen of her save the shining of her eyes and 
the gleam of her little gold shoes. 



72 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Into the pitiful cry of alarm she put all the 
horror and pity which filled her soul, and 
could not be expressed in any calmer fashion. 
Then, as she turned on the light and stood 
once more under the familiar glow of the white 
lamp-shade, she said with a sad smile: "I 
don't know how to discourse, and I don't 
know how to work; that is all I know how to 
do for the war — ^to sing, like the 'cigale' in the 
fable." 

At that moment the door opened and old 
Jean's perplexed countenance appeared again. 
Harder rose quickly to his feet, and bowed 
before Mrs. Felder to take his leave. 

''Au revoir, soldier of the right," she said 
smilingly, but with a touch of emotion in her 



voice. 



Oh," said Daisy, with her somewhat aus- 
tere fervor. "Soldier of the right — ^but also 
soldier of justice." 

No one spoke. She went on insistently: 
"The triumph of right implies victory, but 
that of justice implies and calls for punish- 
ment." Then she added, her voice low and 
constrained : " Men have established right, but 
it is God who does justice." 

"Bravo!" said Mrs. Felder. "Our Daisy is 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 73 

becoming epigrammatic. Daisy, if you begin 
to enunciate formulas, you will marry a 
Frenchman ! " 

"Well," said Daisy, "that will be yet an- 
other way of making war !" And as she broke 
into her clear laughter, the little close white 
teeth fairly shone. "I am in love with France !" 

How beautiful the night was, after the se- 
rene ending of the day ! We walked up the 
Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne with Daisy, 
and with the same Harder whom I had met 
for the first time only an hour ago. The acacias 
shed the pungent perfume of their first blos- 
soming, and high up among dense masses of 
foliage the horse-chestnut flowers stood out 
like white tapers in the twilight of a church. 
The wide avenue was almost empty, and 
slowly falling into the silence which gives to 
night its dignity. The heavy mass of the Arc 
de Triomphe reared its exact lines in the pearl- 
gray shadows, the arch itself full of a deeper 
black. We passed on; the ground sloped gently 
downward, and, like a quiet river between its 
banks, the avenue stretched out, dotted with 
its lights on either side. 

"When one comes from where I have been, 



(< 



74 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

and is going where I am to go/' said Harder, 
"the beauty of Paris seems almost unimagina- 
ble." 

You are leaving us soon ?" I said. 

Most probably," he answered. "For my 
part, I am not like public opinion in America 
— I do not need to be prepared. When one has 
spent two years and a half in Belgium and in 
your invaded provinces, one may not know 
how to make war, but at least one knows the 
reason for making it. For conscience's sake — 
and with us each man likes to reason with his 
own conscience, by himself — and that, after 
all, is the essential point. I wish," he added, as 
he led us with his brisk walk, "that all my 
compatriots at home, on the other side of the 
Atlantic, could have seen what we have. It 
would be like having permission to go into the 
beyond before taking one side or another in 
life. They would all have the faith that moves 
mountains — and they would stand in need of 
it. 

"I think of my country — and although I find 
Paris beautiful — so beautiful ! — ^I should very 
much like to be transported to-night to one of 
our great farms in the West. To the men out 
there, in those vast spaces where they have 
no longer to struggle against nature, any more 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 75 

than against mankind, war will be a new 
idea ! Here you have always been threatened; 
there are globules of defense in all French 
blood. But with us it is different. You have 
found us slow to awaken, slow to come, but 
you cannot know how faint and feeble the rip- 
ples of war have become by the time they 
reach our shores. The New World has pros- 
pered out there, between its two oceans, by 
following an ideal of labor and of peace. 

"And the European wars — old quarrels 
reaching back into centuries of which we 
knew little or nothing — did not interfere in 
the least with either our toil or our tranquilli- 
ty. I have relatives who until a few years ago 
knew almost nothing about Europe. The 
portion of the earth which has fallen to their 
share is quite sufficient to take up all their 
energy — and a lack of energy is not among 
their faults. They can walk for days on their 
own land without meeting an * enemy,' or 
even a neighbor. I wish they were here al- 
ready, but I also wish you could see them in 
their own homes, for then you would under- 
stand what a stupendous adventure it is for 
them to come here to fight on this little 
checker-board of the French departments.'' 

"And they will come, they all will," said 



76 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Daisy. "A sentiment is born in them which 
owes its life, as you say, to conscience, and it 
will grow and become as powerful a motive as 
the indignation felt by other fighting nations/' 

"That is true,'' said Harder. "Germany has 
established a code of political ethics which is 
revolting to conscience as well as reason. 
There is a shade of madness in their dream. 
You have lived in Germany, Miss Folk. Do 
you remember the saying of the old man of 
Konigsberg: 'Political morale begins where 
political morality stops'? It has often come 
into my mind while we were talking with the 
German officers. As we sat quietly drinking 
Moselle wines we often discussed the probabil- 
ity of America's going into the war. Well, the 
young men of my country mean to defend 
political morality against political morale'' 

"There is. only one morality," said Daisy, 
**for there is only one God." 

"That is what every one of our men will 
think as he goes into the fight. At first they 
were ignorant — ^then they hesitated, doubted 
. . . they were slow, I know, but the long 
sleep of peace makes the eyelids of a prosper- 
ous nation heavy. However, they are awake 
now, and coming.'* 



AN EVENING WITH THE C. R. B. 77 



"It is the return voyage of the Mayflower ^'^ 
said Daisy. 

*'Yes," said Harder, "and it is in the coun- 
tries which we found so small that the new 
passengers will find the New World/' 

He stretched out his hand, saying "Good- 
by," shook our hands vigorously, lighted a 
cigarette, and in a moment his slender outline 
was hidden by the night. 



CHAPTER II 

THE AMERICANS IN THE FIRST DAYS OF 

THE WAR 

**And, if they should be unwise or unjust, a flame would rise from 
our tombs, and the blood of our enemies flow in unavailing expia- 
tion." — Goethe, Egmont, Act II. 



w 



E were a party of five one evening at 
the house of Louis Chevrillon. 

There was Morton, a delegate of the C. R. B. 
for the north of France; Hke Harder, he had 
come through the German lines after the 
United States declared war, and to get from 
Lille to Paris (a journey of four hours ordi- 
narily) had been obliged, like his compatriots, 
to make long stages through Belgium, Ger- 
many, and Switzerland. 

(The Germans were anxious that the dele- 
gates should drink a little of the water of 
Lethe; they had seen the army lines — and had 
been in the country behind them.) 

A charming American, Mrs. Vernon, was 
also newly arrived from the invaded districts. 
She had lived in Belgium, associated with all 
the work by means of which the Commission 

78 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 79 

had managed to keep order and sustain life in 
spite of the dire distress. 

I met her then for the first time; she 
spoke of some of our fellow countrymen, ac- 
tually near us and yet far removed, because 
they were on the other side of the front. She 
gave us the names of some of the stout-hearted 
Frenchmen who had remained on the invaded 
soil, and had been able, with the help of the 
C. R. B., to become organizers and providers 
in the haphazard life, made up of a little good 
and much ill fortune, which all led while under 
the German yoke. 

Our hearts warmed to her as she spoke of 
our own people with such affection. Her ex- 
pression betrayed strong emotion, although 
she smiled calmly; she was evidently a woman 
of energy, made up also of sympathy, zeal, 
and goodness; capable of taking a helpless 
multitude into her heart and working for 
them as a mother works for her children, put- 
ting intense feeling into the simple tasks of 
daily life. 

When Mrs. Vernon said "I had the privi- 
lege" ("privilege" was her favorite word) "of 
helping the French in their horrible trial," she 
seemed to us to represent a Veronica saying. 



80 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

with the accent of another land: "I had the 
privilege of wiping the bleeding face of the 
Saviour." 

She was spending her last evening with us, 
on her way to the United States to show her 
countrywomen, with infinite pity and respect, 
the sacred veil. 

It does not hurt to be pitied in such a man- 
ner ! 

The third American was named Rivards, 
and impressed me as being much like Morton; 
one is apt to think that foreigners are more or 
less alike, and these young men had at least 
one trait in common — they never spoke 
of themselves individually. They said "the 
C. R. B." — Commission for Relief in Belgium 
— as the members of a secret society might 
speak of it, and seemed to have lost all recol- 
lection of any life led before they joined the 
C. R. B. "Some of these days I must go and 
see if the United States is still there," said 
one of them. Was this taste for almost anony- 
mous privacy a matter of education ? Did it 
come from a happy gift of altruism ? Or was 
it because what they had seen during the war 
had really made "new men" of them? They 
never said: "Such a thing happened to w^." 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 81 

They were imperturbably cheerful, willing to 
help, polite without being too effusive or too 
ceremonious. It was really hard to make out 
whether they had just come from living among 
the most tragic scenes of the war, or whether 
they had been making a profound study of 
chess or bridge. But it was clear that they had 
brought to the work which they had accepted 
all that was in them of strength, intelligence, 
exactness, and discipline. 

The only time when they showed no trace 
of this slight tinge of puritanism (for such self- 
possession verges on the puritanical) was 
when they spoke of their chief, Mr. Hoover, 
the chairman of the C. R. B., and then they 
were anything but Puritans; they laughed, 
and let themselves go: 

"Hurrah for Hoover!'* 

On the table the portrait of Hoover re- 
mained unmoved by this sudden outbreak of 
enthusiasm, in the midst of formidable piles 
of reports and magazines in which the work 
of the C. R. B. was recorded. It was the like- 
ness of a man of few words; the brow low 
and unwrinkled, under strongly growing hair; 
the eyes deep-set in their sockets and very 
bright, as of a man quick to observe; the lips 



■ ' ■ ■ 

82 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

thin and tightly closed, without even the 
shadow of a smile; the head slightly bent, as 
if, even while in the hands of the photographer. 
Hoover was thinking of some obstacle to be 
quickly and silently removed. 

That was the impression produced on us by 
the chief of this new little neutral power, the 
C. R. B., as he looked out from his frame. The 
name of Hoover was continually on the lips of 
Mrs. Vernon and of our young imperturbables. 
These workers of the first hours interested us 
greatly, for their quiet exactness was a prom- 
ise, as surely as a swallow promises spring, 
that the American intervention would be 
prompt and well thought out. 

Hoover in his frame seemed to be think- 
ing: '*They will strike hard.'* 

As I said before, there were five of us, two 
women and three men — ^three Americans and 
two French. We had just had a little war din- 
ner in a dining-room which would be delightful 
on a yacht — ^very small, well ventilated, and 
with two windows set in angles. As we went 
up the stairs to the apartment, its owner 
rushed past us, fresh from the offices of the 
C. R. B. He flew up the five stories at a head- 
long rate, for he bore, swathed in the august 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 83 

pages of the Temps, the chief dish for our 
dinner — ^two superb soles, which he had bought 
at the great Prunier's on his way home. 

We had eaten the soles, preceded and fol- 
lowed by a lot of the odd little things which 
delight the mistresses of ordinary common- 
place houses when they dine with brothers, 
cousins, or friends who are eccentric and im- 
penitent bachelors. 

Mrs. Vernon threw a slight shadow over 
our innocent mirth at this modest feast by 
taking in her hand a piece of bread. Bread was 
still good in Paris, and the crisp crust made a 
sort of golden case for the soft white crumb 
inside it; she turned it over and caressed it 
tenderly with her fingers, as if it had been 
some precious thing, saying: 

^'Rivards, what would we have given, a 
month ago, to have been able to take a piece 
of bread like this to the table of a French 
family?" 

"Don't reproach me on account of my 
bread," said Chevrillon. 

"It is not in the least a reproach," answered 
Mrs. Vernon. "I was only thinking that this 
is the promised land, and of the people whom 
we have left behind in the desert; the very 



84 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

ordinary and every -day words for food have 
become almost sacred to me" — and she still 
held the bit of bread in her dainty fingers. 

"One day in our district of Peronne," said 
Rivards, "I saw on the desk of one of our 
Americans five little flasks full of grains and 
powders; I recognized rice, and wondered if 
our friend were secretly keeping turtle-doves. 
He saw me looking at the bottles, and said: 
'In each one of those I have put the daily 
allowance of wheat, rice, sugar, and coffee 
doled out to a Frenchman. It is my daily les- 
son, and when I find myself inclined to think 
that our diet in the invaded territory is some- 
what frugal, the sight of those little bottles 
ekes out my meal. No,' he said, as if guessing 
my guilty thought, 'that is not food for birds, 
but the rations of French men and women.' " 

"That is called the life-sustaining allow- 
ance," said Morton, "and millions of human 
beings work hard for it and thank God when 
it is given them. It is nine o'clock," he said, 
looking at his watch; "in a few hours, at dawn, 
or even earlier, the lines will begin to be 
formed and to grow outside our canteens in 
the invaded country." 

At Chevrillon's signal we left the table, and 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 85 

as the evening was mild we crowded out upon 
the balcony. From our fifth story we were on 
neighborly terms with the tops of the plane- 
trees as they swayed rustling in the light 
breeze, and we could watch the shining course 
of the Seine far below, for just here, at the 
Quai Debilly, the river makes a graceful and 
indolent curve between its stone-lined banks. 
The plane-trees and poplars planted on either 
side, alike in height and growth, leaned for- 
ward a little to follow it in its course, like a 
row of suitors when their lady-love passes by. 

Seats were brought out for the ladies — ^two 
narrow deck chairs, over which were thrown 
roughly woven Mexican blankets, broadly 
striped in black and white. 

There we were as if seated on primitive 
thrones. The night landscape was full of 
beauty. The quiet river shone through the 
trees, and as far as we could see towers and the 
spires of churches lifted themselves into the 
transparent air. In front of us the Eiffel Tower, 
a filagree of light and dark, was a fairy ladder 
waiting for sprites to climb moonward, while 
from its lantern, crowned with glowing stars, 
search-lights threw their rapid and furtive 
rays into space, like the glances of anxious 



86 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

eyes. To the right, a great mass of undefined 
shadow, lay the Bois de Boulogne. 

"Although I have often been in Paris," said 
Mrs. Vernon, "it seems different now in war- 
time. I have never seen the city so broadly 
mapped out under the stars; it looks like a 
very dark print." 

"I am very fond of this war Paris," said 
Morton. He was playing with a little cat 
which he had snatched up on his knees; it was 
like a tiny ghost of a cat, gray as a shadow or 
a wreath of smoke. In winter, when it was 
lazily curled round, asleep on the hearth, close 
to the dying embers, it looked like a little 
heap of ashes. We called it Cendret. 

"I am very fond of this war Paris," repeated 
Morton. 

"Paris has around it and above it space 
and sky," said Mrs. Vernon, leaning over the 
balcony, "and it has also silence. One hears 
the water sliding past, and the trees breath- 
ing." And she stretched out her hand with a 
prettily earnest gesture, saying: "May war 
never touch, nor even menace any one of your 
beautiful stones." And she added: "I appre- 
ciate this symmetry all the more because I 
have seen so many lovely and venerable things 
perish. I have witnessed frightful and wide- 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 87 

spread destruction, but I have never seen a 
stone fall from a cottage in your ravaged land 
without being conscious of the feeling of order 
and of attachment which had placed and kept 
it there. I was in a church one day, at Saint 
Omer. Shells had pierced it through and 
through; bits of sky showed through the rents 
in the vaulted roof; crows had built their nests 
in the capitals of the pillars, and flew scream- 
ing and cawing in the place which formerly 
had only heard the murmur of prayers. Grass 
grew between the flagstones. As I looked a 
large stone became detached from the roof and 
fell into the choir . . . and then another . . . and 
yet another. They fell, one by one, and the 
sound of their falling was repeated sonorously 
from the arch overhead. How I thought that 
day of the hands that had set those stones in 
place ! I love France so dearly that I even love 
the hard-working hands of the men long dead, 
who mixed the mortar and held the trowel . . . 
and to come where all this beauty is intact 
makes more poignant the contrast with the 
desolation we have left behind." 

A brisk current of air made us turn our 
heads; the door opened, and in came our 
friends Daisy and Nettie Bell. 

We left the balcony, as it would not have 



88 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

held us all, and as Daisy was shaking hands 
with her compatriots she said : 

"I am sure you must have been speaking of 
the C. R. B." 

"Not at all/' said Morton. "We were say- 
ing that Paris in the moonlight, swathed in 
her dark war-veils, seems to us a new city." 

"Everything is new," said Daisy. "We our- 
selves," and she looked at her companion, "we 
are also new." 

"As for me," said Mrs. Felder, "I feel as if 
I had only really been born on the day when 
my country went into the war. I am youth 
itself!" And as she stood smiling before the 
mirror she twisted around her fingers the little 
curls, shining with silver threads, which had 
strayed from under her toque. 

"We have known the French," she went on, 
"as people do who have often met, but only 
at masquerades, with masks and in dominoes. 
And, face to face, we have gone through the 
complicated steps of the dance which calls 
itself international life." 

"That is precisely the reason," said Daisy, 
"that neither of us has been able to see the 
national life of the other. We demanded of 
Paris that she should make a display of pre- 
tentious frivolities for us." 




p 
a, 
o 
a, 



+-> 
o 



72 



Q 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 89 

"The France of foreigners," said Mrs. 
Felder, "was not at all that of the French." 

"In fact," said Daisy, "we have often been 
amused by the ignorance of Parisians about 
the only side of Paris known to us. We Hked 
to see a Hght which was only phosphorescence. 
After thousands of years, we are still interested 
in the phosphorescence of Athens and of 
Rome." 

"The most attractive thing in a really 
strong being is his weakness," said Nettie Bell. 

"We did not see the fire," said Daisy; "we 
were only looking at its reflection." 

"It was not the torrent," went on Nettie 
Bell quickly; "it was the froth on the stream, 
which dissolved between our fingers." 

"It was not the forest," Daisy answered at 
once (they were both evidently amused by the 
duet), "but the creepers which flowered and 
nodded around the old trunks. All the winds 
of the earth seemed to come together here, 
sowing good and bad seed broadcast. Do you 
remember, Nettie Bell, the big orchids in our 
Southern woods .? They swayed to and fro, 
dazzlingly beautiful, under the branches of 
our oaks, but they had no roots." 

"Yes," said Nettie Bell, "I remember them; 
I have often gathered them in a wood which I 



90 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

knew well. I loved the long evenings when we 
used to cut their greedy dusters." 

"They perished when the cold winds blew," 
said Daisy, "and were strewn on the ground, 
exquisite in death." 

"And then," said Nettie Bell, "the great 
trees, stripped of their smothering ornaments, 
showed their strength as they held their own 
against the blast which had raised the long 
waves of the ocean." 

"Is this an apologue?" asked Morton 
gravely. 

"Of course it is," said the pair, glancing 
meaningly at each other. 

"Our friends are very poetical this eve- 
ning," said Mrs. Vernon. 

"It is not we who are poetical," said Daisy, 
"all France is a great tragic poem. Have you 
noticed that every one says: ^It is impossible 
for me to do any reading' ? Imagination has 
never conceived anything so portentous as 
what we are living through." 

"I have not been in Paris since 1914," said 
Mrs. Vernon, "and then only for a day. It was 
in September. I had come from Brittany, and 
was trying to get to London. It was on a Sun- 
day, and the German menace hung over Paris 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 91 

like a malevolent cloud. The government and 
the administration had moved to Bordeaux. I 
looked with anxious curiosity at the Parisians, 
as one looks at children who have been left 
alone. They were all evidently under a great 
strain. I remember one woman's saying to me 
that afternoon: 'I don't know whether I can 
hear cannon very far away, or whether it is 
only my heart beating.' I was all alone, trying 
to get through a long Sunday of waiting. I 
took a cab, and wandered rather aimlessly 
along the quays; I wanted to see Paris with 
her beauty still unharmed; it seemed an un- 
imaginable calamity that within twenty-four 
hours it might be destroyed. Almost without 
knowing it I found myself at the He de la 
Cite, and there I heard what sounded like a 
powerful yet calm and rhythmical murmur. I 
left the cab, and went as far as Notre Dame. 
An immense crowd was gathered in the great 
square before the cathedral. The three deeply 
recessed doors of the church were wide open, 
and at the end of these long avenues of shadow 
I could see the interior, all aflame with can- 
dles. The worshippers who thronged the nave 
and aisles were singing; their voices came out 
to us deadened and distant, as if from another 



92 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

world, almost drowned by the rolling of the 
mighty organ. In the great square the immense 
crowd, with one voice, chanted the responses. 
The children who had been left alone sang — 
and prayed. 

"It was a peculiar experience for a stranger 
to be thus thrown, almost by accident, into 
the intimate life of a whole city on a day of 
sore distress. I had never seen the cathedral 
church of Paris literally overflowing with life 
and echoing to prayers. It was for that, and 
not to be a precious and half-deserted monu- 
ment, that the mighty church had been reared. 
On her island, with the river flowing around 
her, she was like a great mystical vessel laden 
with pilgrims, coming down with the current 
toward the plain. It seemed as if the great 
metal statues on the roof were for the first 
time set free from their hierarchical align- 
ment; as if the saints were going freely to and 
fro, like anxious mariners watching the heav- 
ens and the sea. Some of them seemed to go 
down narrow stairs, almost like rope ladders, 
outside the turrets, swiftly and calmly, speak- 
ing one to the other. As I was looking at them 
with amazement I saw another strange sight 
in the open space around the old vessel girdled 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 93 

with the waters; more statues were moving in 
an undulating manner, as if they were being 
borne on invisible shoulders above the crowd. 
They were the patrons and saviors of France; 
I heard the people near me call them by name 
— Saint Denis; Saint Genevieve, tall and erect 
in her silver robes; Saint Louis; Jeanne d'Arc, 
carrying her banner. They had been brought 
out of old reliquaries; they prayed with the 
people and the people prayed with them." 

"Our friend is even more poetical than we 
were," said Daisy. 

"It is only that I have never forgotten that 
vision," said Mrs. Vernon. "Perhaps the love 
inspired in me by France dates from that day. 
Those myriads of people, pouring from every 
quarter, were communing with their past; 
they sought a means of escape from the 
dreaded morrow by going deep down in their 
history, back toward their forefathers, on 
the same little island where Saint Genevieve 
had watched over the ramparts threatened by 
the same foe; it was a vision of the fifth cen- 
tury. So much for your Babylonian Paris!" 
And she added, with emotion: "To belong to 
an old nation is a noble inheritance. We shall 
all have, like young crusaders, the recollection 



94 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

of some particular date, that of the day on 
which we first understood what this war really 
meant. Do you remember, Daisy, at the time 
of the presidential election in the United 
States, six months ago, the big posters in 
every street of every town, in all the States ? 
One saw the thin, cold face of Mr. Wilson, 
with his light, observant eyes behind their 
glasses, and underneath were the words: ^He 
kept us out of war.'" 

"Yes," said Daisy, "I remember those 
posters; they corresponded to the feeling of 
that day. We had not then begun to under- 
stand the inner meaning of the war. Our young 
and sensible country was perhaps rational in 
holding back from the convulsion called war; 
we thought ourselves safe from the periodic 
eruptions of the old European volcano." 

"Besides, war was not a volcanic eruption 
for the United States," observed Morton. 
"We came into it without a shock, with no 
surprise, through internal processes due to 
conscience and intelligence. The same likeness 
of the same President Wilson might be still 
shown on every wall of every city in all the 
States, with the same eyes, as cool and observ- 
ant as ever, and we should take off our hats 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 95 

while we wrote under the portrait: 'He de- 
clared war.' He spared us a period of opposi- 
tion, discussion, and disagreement, and the 
whole nation, turning completely round from 
the idea of peace to that of war, went forward 
at the pace set by him. After such lucid and 
methodical reasoning the necessity for war 
was as clear as the demonstration of a math- 
ematical problem." 

"Yes," said Daisy, "and the rational young 
continent will make war strongly and logi- 
cally; I see my country, her decision once 
made, resolved to go on to the end, and put- 
ting forth all her strength to back her will. 
We seem very unlike, springing as we do from 
such different stocks; our flowering may be 
widely different, but all our roots are struck 
deep in American soil; we all stretch upward 
toward the sun with the same energy — toward 
what we will to do. We shall see that the war 
will be a sort of *fiat lux' for the nation. We 
were saying the other day that we had not 
known Germany, nor did she know us. We 
were amazed by England, and we may con- 
fess now that we did not really know how 
much mysterious and magnetic force there 
was in France. You will acknowledge some 



96 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

day that you had only crude and fragmentary 
ideas about us." 

"What will surprise the French more than 
anything else," said Mrs. Vernon, "is the sim- 
plicity, amounting almost to candor, of our 
men. What have they known of us, for the 
most part ? The so-called American women 
represented in their novels or plays, and the 
little gilded crowd that was to be found in 
Paris between the quarter of the Etoile and 
that of the Opera, or in the various 'Palaces.* 
However" (and her sensitive face showed her 
relief), "we shall now see each other as we 
really are — ^we shall know what your religion 
so rightly calls 'the inner life.' The inner life 
of a people is ordinarily hidden, and only re- 
veals itself in times of trial. I have felt it so 
strongly in France ! We at home are still mak- 
ing speeches, taking diplomatic notes, expand- 
ing in the verbal enthusiasm of people gener- 
ously stirred by a great cause. It will be 
different when our troops get here; when you 
know what my contemporaries have never 
known; when American blood begins to be 
shed. It is then that you will know us for 
what we really are, and until that time comes, 
do not speak of us at all. I thought I loved 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 97 

France," she went on, "but I did not know 
her until I saw her suffer and bleed during 
my long stay in the invaded country. I had 
the happiness— yes, the happiness — of passing 
many months shut up with the French, and 
facing the Germans. All that I had read about 
France previously, and all that I had myself 
seen, counted for nothing. We shall always 
consider that it was our privilege — I hold to 
that word 'privilege' — to enter thus into the 
life of a people during their trial, to be in in- 
timate relations with them, and to see their 
wound. 

"That wound was the scarcity of food — ^hun- 
ger. One may manage to accept the usual idea 
of war, that of men fighting among themselves, 
but when we knew, while I was still in Amer- 
ica, that the Belgian and French population in 
the invaded districts was threatened with 
famine, we were all shaken by emotion. Mor- 
ton, you were in London — ^you heard the first 
cry for help." 

"Yes," said Morton, "it came from Brus- 
sels. My compatriot, Millard Shaler, who was 
sent by Belgian committees, brought the first 
message, and our ambassador in London, Mr. 
Page, received it. It was an historic moment 



98 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

for us," he said, looking at his companions, 
*'for it was then that the C. R. B. was organ- 
ized — on the 25th of September, 1914. The 
invasion of Belgium had somewhat slackened 
— ^the breach had been made, and the German 
armies were pouring into France. In Belgium 
the Germans were beginning to install them- 
selves — ^you know how ! They were forming an 
administration, appointing a governor-general 
and governors of the different provinces. But 
this administration chiefly concerned itself 
with feeding the German armies, that is to 
say, with gathering in the foodstuffs and 
requisitioning the cattle. As well as we could 
count, 215,000 Belgians took refuge in France 
during August and September, 1914; 80,000 
went into Holland after the capture of Ant- 
werp, and there were about 100,000 in Eng- 
land. If you saw these multitudes leaving or 
arriving, you felt that you were witnessing 
the exodus of a whole nation. Large num- 
bers are always impressive. But, as a mat- 
ter of fact, the reality was different. Only 
a minority had fled — ^they who had happened 
to be in the blood-stained path of the armies. 
There still remained seven millions of souls 
— or rather of mouths — ^to be fed in a country 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 99 

whose agricultural and industrial riches had 
been destroyed or confiscated, and which was 
constantly overrun by German armies going 
or coming, by the German wounded, by tired 
troops who were resting before being sent to 
the Russian front. And all of them ate and ate. 

"I think it was the great burgomaster Max, 
now revered the world over, who was au- 
thorized by the Central Committee to enter 
into negotiations with the Germans in order 
that some thousands of tons of food supplies 
might be admitted into Belgium. 

''This Central Committee was made up of 
rich and influential men, accustomed to han- 
dle large business transactions, without regard 
to their political opinions. They were, there- 
fore, not 'officials'; they did not represent the 
government with which Germany was at war; 
they represented only the hungry millions, and 
sought to feed them. 

"M. Solvay gave his great name to this 
national committee; M. Janssen also joined it, 
and M. Francqui became its managing di- 
rector. It is only bare justice to name the Bel- 
gians before speaking of ourselves. Their coun- 
try had no more money and no more wheat. 
Only one thing was left — its men. 



100 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

"The committee addressed itself in the sec- 
ond instance to the diplomatic representa- 
tives of the neutral powers who had remained 
in Brussels: the American minister. Brand 
Whitlock, and the Marquis of Villalobar, who 
represented the King of Spain. 

"It was thus that the first few links of a 
double chain were forged. It was necessary, on 
the one hand, to fill the empty granaries of 
Belgium from the reserve stocks of Europe 
and America, and, on the other, to reach the 
German authorities, such as the governors of 
provinces, or even the general government, as 
without their consent the vessels loaded with 
wheat from the United States would hasten in 
vain to the docks of Rotterdam. The manna 
would not fall from heaven of itself; it could 
only come through a door in the wall of fire 
and iron enclosing Belgium, and unless that 
door were opened by German hands, famine 
would take possession of the beleaguered 
land.'' 

" Villalobar," said Daisy. "Was he the same 
who had been Spanish minister at Lisbon?'' 

"Why, yes," answered Mrs. Vernon, "and 
if you had known him you would think as I 
do, that there could not be two Villalobars." 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 101 

"To be sure V said Daisy. "He is a remark- 
able man. And when one has met him it is 
impossible to think of Spain and the Span- 
iards without caUing to memory his strikingly 
Spanish face. Love of old Spain was deep- 
rooted in his heart. He loved her, and yet he 
also had visions of a new young Spain, casting 
off the fetters of tradition and custom to move 
freely in the modern world. If I were to see 
him again, how I should like to remind him of 
the days which we spent together in the Por- 
tuguese back country, when we both used to 
dip into the great pots in which the foundation 
of rice was mixed with a varied assortment of 
Spanish peppers, crabs, shell-fish, and skinny 
little pullets. It was then, in those hostelries 
which might have sheltered Don Quixote, that 
Villalobar used to speak of his sovereign and 
of his dreams for Spain, until his every 's' 
seemed full of energy." 

"That is indeed he," said Morton. "He has 
not changed, and he earnestly and nobly in- 
sisted that his sovereign should play a great 
part in this matter of feeding a whole country. 
Do you follow the thread.?" he went on. 
"First came the appeal from the famished 
people, and the Belgian Control Committee 



102 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

was formed. Even before the war there was 
a well-organized system of charitable relief 
throughout Belgium. In a small country, liv- 
ing and thriving by its industry, the classes are 
not widely separated ; the rich man is nearer to 
his poor neighbor, the employer to his work- 
men, the landowner to those who till his soil. 
Besides that, the two great political parties, 
Catholic and Liberal, were equally concerned 
with the problems of relief. It must also be 
remembered that the country was not central- 
ized in its capital. We found, as Harder was 
saying the other day, that the Belgian people 
are full of civic as well as of national love and 
pride. That is a natural result of their past 
history; each city — ^Liege, Antwerp, Malines, 
Ghent — ^had already its own charities, worked 
for and helped by its citizens. It was as though 
the working drawings had been made for a 
great building which should shelter the refu- 
gees from the country, and the indigent and 
unemployed in the towns. The old spirit of 
local pride, whether in cities or in villages, 
sprang up more strongly than ever, and you 
must bear in mind that each town was iso- 
lated from other towns, that each village stood 
by itself. It should never be forgotten that 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 103 

this system of separate cells was enforced 
throughout the whole of the occupied dis- 
tricts, and the suffering which it entailed will 
never be fully known. Nobody had heard of it 
when Millard Shaler came to London with 
his German safe-conduct, to hoist there his 
signal of distress. Popular feeling was deeply 
stirred. Could it be possible that a whole na- 
tion was faced with famine ! You know that 
very many English people were most hospita- 
ble to the Belgian refugees, not only giv- 
ing them food and shelter in various buildings, 
but also inviting them to private houses; I 
know of a number of English homes in which 
the guest-chamber was occupied by a Belgian 
couple who in every way shared the life of 
their hosts. Acquaintance and friendship had 
already sprung up, and when the news spread 
that Belgium was suffering from hunger, the 
English were still more drawn toward their 
refugees; when they looked at the little foreign 
children among their own in the nursery of 
an evening they could' well imagine the suffer- 
ing which was hanging over Belgium. But the 
American ambassador, a neutral, was the only 
man who could act in the matter, and on the 
1st of October Mr. Page received Mr. Hugh 



104 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Gibson, secretary of our legation at Brussels, 
who had come in order to confirm Mr. Shaler's 
message officially. Mr. Page at once set to 
work to solve the difficult problem in the only 
sensible, indeed the only possible, manner — ^by 
finding a man — ^not a potentate, nor a philan- 
thropist, nor a sociologist, nor a generous mil- 
lionaire — ^but just a man." 

"A man capable of inspiring enthusiasm," 
I said. 

"Not altogether enthusiasm," said Mrs. 
Vernon, "or at least not enthusiasm only; a 
man who should be able to make other men 
respond to his energy and to his devotion to 
duty." 

"That man," continued Morton, "was 
Hoover. The Hoover of to-day you all know, 
but at that time he had scarcely been heard 
of, except in the business world. All of us in 
the United States have to look for our ances- 
tors somewhere in Europe. Hoover is a name 
of Flemish origin, and the man himself was 
well known in London as a mining engineer. 
His family had at one time been Quakers, and 
from them he derives his look of reserve, his 
tightly closed lips, and his taciturnity. His 
work as an engineer had led him to Australia 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 105 

and China, as well as all over America; half 
of his life had been spent in rapid travel; he 
went from London to Hanoi as a business 
man In London goes from his house to his 
office in the city, and he had looked at the 
world wherever he went with his gray, sa- 
gacious eyes — ^the observant eyes of an engi- 
neer. He was a man who saw and was not 
afraid to act. 

"He had very vivid recollections of the Ger- 
mans, whom he had seen in China at the time 
of the Boxer troubles. Some German troops 
were quartered in a Chinese village, and one 
evening the men became, as the report put 
it afterward, ^slightly drunk,' broke into the 
little native houses, and violated the women 
whom they found. Now you know that when 
a Chinese woman loses her honor it is her duty 
to die, and the morning after the German 
soldiers had amused themselves in their fash- 
ion, Hoover saw the bodies of hundreds of 
Chinese women drifting down a narrow 
stream; they had all thrown themselves into 
it together. 

"Hoover told us how the gayly colored 
gowns and the black sashes with their big 
bows full of water came slowly floating be- 



106 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

tween the reeds; a close procession of drowned 
women, looking as if a flock of bright-hued 
birds had alighted and were being borne along 
by the current. 

"He said sometimes that when he remem- 
bered that sight it was easy for him to imagine 
what the German occupation, even of a civi- 
lized country, would mean; the words German 
forces, requisitions, scarcity, famine, had ter- 
rible significance for him. 

"Page sent for Hoover and told him that 
the Belgian committees (and six months later 
it was the same story from the French com- 
mittees in the invaded districts) were in great 
distress, having neither supplies nor money. 
If a neutral committee could be formed to 
import and control food, the Belgian and 
French organizations would see that it was 
properly distributed. 

"Hoover knew our planet. He knew where- 
abouts on the earth gold, copper, tin, or dia- 
monds might be found; he had even rediscov- 
ered, in a crevice of Mount Sinai, the old mine 
from which the Egyptians took the greenish 
turquoises that we believed to have been dis- 
colored by time in the tombs. He would be 
able to find in other mines wheat, bacon, 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 107 

beans, shoes, woollens, and cottons, as well as 
the ships to carry these stores to Holland, 
and, above all, money to start the work. He 
could be at the same time in London, New 
York, San Francisco, Brussels, and Berlin; 
his genius for ubiquity was unrivalled. 

"Hoover listened to his ambassador silently; 
then he went to his engineering office, shut up 
shop, and I don't know whether he has ever 
been back at his office. The different mining 
companies saw no more of their consulting 
engineer. 

"Hoover's first committee was made up of 
men of his own profession. He had confidence 
in them as a body; they had been all over the 
world, and knew it well; they also knew the 
reverse of the medal as well as its face; they 
were familiar with material difficulties verging- 
on the impossible; they had often foreseen 
and witnessed accidents and catastrophes — 
they had also often averted them. 

"The Belgians and French were in the posi- 
tion of a large gang of miners overwhelmed 
by a landslide. It had happened, on a smaller 
scale, to men before. Their calls for help could 
be heard; the would-be helpers knew that the 
prisoners were still alive, that they were calm 



108 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

and strong in their patient waiting. It was a 
question of getting them out without making 
a false move which would bury them more 
deeply, and of managing to feed them until 
they could again see the light of day. A prob- 
lem of this sort naturally interested the engi- 
neers. 

"The committee met In London on October 
22, 19 14, and the most pressing questions with 
which it had to deal were set forth in the fol- 
lowing order: 

"To find money for the purchase of food 
supplies. 

"To come to an agreement first with the 
British Government, in order that the block- 
ade of the German ports and of the invaded 
territory should be suspended at a place to be 
determined upon. 

"To obtain from the German Govern- 
ment subsequently a guarantee that the food 
brought into Belgium should be used for the 
benefit of the civilian population only, the 
same guarantee to apply later to France. 

"Finally, to make distribution certain and 
effective, an agreement to be reached allowing 
the American delegates to live behind the 
German lines in Belgium and northern France, 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 109 

and to have sole and entire control of all sup- 
plies imported. The foodstuffs were to be re- 
ceived by the delegates at Rotterdam (for all 
this class of freight came, and still comes, to 
that port), allotted by them to their agents 
in different regions, and sent off under seal, 
to the various centres of distribution. There 
they were to be counted, reallotted, and fol- 
lowed step by step in their dispersal until at 
last they should reach the village depots 
where they were to be sold or given away; 
the Belgian or French women would dole 
them out to the very poor, to hospitals, to 
schools, and even to the houses of the in- 
habitants, where the meagre rations would 
keep famine away from the family table. 

"This comprehensive plan was carried out 
with great rapidity; the first meeting of the 
committee was held, as I have said, in London 
on the 22d of October. Not many days later 
an old deep-sea captain of an American 
steamer bound for Liverpool with a cargo of 
wheat was quietly smoking his pipe on her 
deck when he received a message by wireless 
telegraphy: 'Take your cargo to Rotterdam.' 
His astonishment was great, but the message 
came from the company which employed him, 



no THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

so he changed his course forthwith, and on 
the 5th of November the first vessel laden 
with wheat for the C. R. B. came into the 
Dutch port, where one of our members. Cap- 
tain Lucey, was impatiently awaiting it. He 
took over the cargo at once, and sent it on to 
Brussels, where our minister, Mr. Whitlock, 
and our delegates began its distribution." 

''But I want to follow the plan more 
closely," I said. "Where did the money come 
from .? Who paid for the wheat ?" 

"The money!" said Mrs. Vernon. "The 
money came from ever3rwhere; after the first 
days of November it poured into the coffers of 
the C. R. B.; Hoover and his Central Commit- 
tee made a general appeal through the press, 
and throughout the world committees and 
auxiliaries were formed to raise the funds 
needed. These committees sprang up in Eng- 
land, America, Australia, even in Japan and 
China. To open the mail of the C. R. B. at its 
offices in London, which I have done many a 
time, was to witness the working of a magic 
spell; checks from all the quarters of the globe 
were piled up in heaps. Belgium will know 
some day, if she does not already, what burn- 
ing sympathy and compassion her plight 




c. s 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 111 

aroused in every land. We Americans espe- 
cially felt that it was an immense satisfaction 
to our consciences to be able to give at least 
money to these outraged countries. Each fam- 
ily wished to be something more than inquisi- 
tive neutrals, making their own flesh creep by 
reading horrible stories in the newspapers. In 
London one daily paper pledged itself to raise 
a hundred thousand pounds a month by pop- 
ular subscription. That was a wonderful time 
for us women ! We left knotty questions, such 
as the British blockade and the German guar- 
antees, to be settled by the men; our business 
was only to provide money. We had to or- 
ganize committees without end: large com- 
mittees in the great cities, smaller ones in 
small towns, and even committees in the agri- 
cultural districts, to reach the big farms. 

"Daisy, you must remember, for you were 
there, the market for flowers and vegetables 
which was organized by our San Francisco 
committee. We set up our booths on the great 
square, facing the bay; and those of us who 
were members of the committee wore the cos- 
tumes of one or other of the Belgian or French 
provinces. We all had tucked away in our port- 
folios pictures of your old national costumes 



112 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

which perhaps had been brought over by your 
emigrating ancestors; we were famiUar with 
the head-dresses, the ribbons, the short, full 
skirts; to us they were full of charm, perhaps 
because we have no such thing as a peasant 
among us. With us a farmer is a gentleman 
who sells wheat, a business man like any other, 
and the word 'peasant' and the Old World 
costumes have therefore an almost poetic at- 
traction which would be hard for you to 
understand. 

"We sold our wares all day in the big square 
— our California guava, our muskmelons, our 
cherries, our yellow eschscholtzia — and our 
roses. All our bankers and merchants, our 
millionaires and billionaires, came themselves 
as early as seven o'clock in the morning to 
make their purchases at our booths, and we 
had to laugh as they went back to their 
motor-cars, carrying huge cauliflowers, great 
baskets of pears or apples, or armfuls of 
chrysanthemums and roses. As for me, I sold 
for a big price — oh, a tremendous price, to a 
banker who was not supposed to be in the 
least sentimental — a little linen bag embroi- 
dered with a lily-of-the-valley; in the bag was 
a handful of earth which a refugee woman 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 113 

from the north of France had brought with 
her as Orientals carry tahsmans. 

"All day long we sold to men who were sup- 
posed to be hard and practical all sorts of im- 
possibly foolish little trifles, such as you would 
sell here to children. A button from a French 
general's uniform made a great hit. Our men 
out there are at the same time realists and 
sentimentalists. They will not take time to 
read a pathetic story, but their hearts are 
moved by what they can see with their own 
eyes. They belong to the family of Saint 
Thomas, and the more you know of them the 
more you will be conscious of this quality; you 
must give them something visible and tangi- 
ble. 

"I have told you about San Francisco, but 
It was the same story everywhere. For in- 
stance, at Denver, in the Rocky Mountains, 
a committee had been formed in order to get 
up a club. Hoover was then making a cam- 
paign in America; he stopped at Denver, as- 
sembled the committee, spoke to them of Bel- 
gium for a quarter of an hour — and when he 
left, all the money which had been collected 
for the club was in his pocket. It was a matter 
of a change of heart, of a couple of words and 



114 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

a couple of signatures, and that Rocky Moun- 
tain city had to do without its club. I don't 
want to seem to boast of our having given 
money — I didn't mean that — ^I only meant to 
show Hoover's quick and compelling magnet- 
ism. It was not the mere money — ^that would 
not have been worth mentioning — but the giv- 
ing of it, so instantly, so spontaneously, meant 
that the picture of Belgian distress had aroused 
pity and wonder in every heart. In the most 
remote little towns of the United States, where 
the war seemed infinitely far away, there was 
the same thrill of wonder and compassion for 
Belgium and France — and people gave and 
gave. That encouraged us, for we also, as 
Daisy can tell you, made a campaign of our 
own. In French we should be obliged to say 
that we made addresses or gave lectures — ^but 
in English, luckily, we can say more simply 
that we spoke. We went about from town to 
town in our own California; sometimes the 
meeting was held in a theatre, but often out- 
of-doors, if the weather was fine. We simply 
said, 'This is what we have seen,' and a few 
weeks later the checks came pouring into 
London. When we first began we were some- 
what doubtful as to the result. The war was 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 115 

so far off — and then it seemed as if an atmos- 
phere of inviolable peace surrounded our Cali- 
fornian country, our splendid gardens, our 
parks, our orchards covered with domes of 
blossoms under which one may drive in spring. 
When their working day is over our men seem 
to absorb peace as they sit in the large, fine 
houses which they love to build, and look out 
over lawns where the great cedars stand up 
like temples of silence. Some among us have 
pride of peace, as in Germany there is pride 
of war; peace means freedom won by moral 
striving toward justice and mutual tolerance. 
We had among us many who called them- 
selves 'haters of war.' Some went so far as to 
refuse to hear anything about *the raving 
madness of Europe.'" 

** Yes," said Daisy, "but they listened to us, 
and when we told them of the suffering in 
Belgium and invaded France they loosened 
their purse-strings. They asked nothing better 
than to give money, and by so doing they 
drew nearer to the great questions of the war. 
Moved by pity, they asked themselves the 
reason of this frightful injustice, and already 
their hearts had begun to take sides. 

"You are such a logical and reasonable race 



116 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

that you have no idea of the strength of sen- 
timent in our country. Our men are pecuHar; 
they are sharp at a bargain, and sometimes 
hard to get on with; business with them is a 
game in which their energy is strained to the 
utmost. The more money they make the more 
enjoyment they have, the more they feel their 
power and their superiority over their rivals. 
But once away from their offices they are 
extraordinarily human, almost sensitive — ^I 
should like to say tender, but in your over- 
sensible and somewhat mocking country that 
would sound ridiculous. 

"It cost them nothing, absolutely nothing, 
to give; if they were cautious as to anything 
more it was because they did not want to 
take part in the European dance of death. 
The ocean which washes their shores is well 
named the Pacific, and they were pacific as 
well." 

"That is not the same thing as being paci- 
fists," said Daisy. 

"Not at all," said Mrs. Vernon, "and the 
pacific 'haters of war' will very likely send 
you some day troops who will fight obstinately 
until they conquer. Their conversion is being 
prepared by stories of the nanieless sufferings 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 117 

inflicted on a people who were only defend- 
ing the soil of their country, 

"Sometimes money was given us and at 
other times wheat or flour. 

"Once at Philadelphia we saw a steamer 
sail with an entire cargo of flour, the gift of 
the flour-dealers of Minneapolis. A crowd had 
gathered on the dock. The steamer looked as 
if it had been powdered all over; flour was 
dusting about everywhere; the captain, white 
as a miller, was laughing, and the sailors 
laughed too; every one was in high spirits, 
and when the anchor was weighed and the 
flag hoisted there was great cheering. Nova 
Scotia also sent cargoes of provisions, at her 
own expense. Such vessels were called 'gift 
ships,' and on their subscription lists were 
names of many people who had but little to 
give, and also of many children. And then 
later I saw another steamer go off; it was 
about Christmas time, 1915, and it was called 
'the Christmas ship' — I told you we were 
very sentimental ! Her cargo was made up of 
toys and playthings for the Belgian children, 
little clothes for them, and ornaments of tin- 
sel, glass, and gilt or silver paper for their 
Christmas-trees. We actually had a president 



118 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

of a maritime company, its stockholders, the 
captain of a ship and its crew, who were wiUing 
to risk their boat and the Uves of all on board 
in order that the little Belgians might be able 
to keep their traditional holiday. 

"Notwithstanding all stipulations, the Min- 
neapolis gift ship was sunk by a submarine 
on her return voyage. But that was only one 
out of many; the other ships went their way, 
and arrived at Rotterdam. They were rather 
like the rich man in the gospel who had to 
pass through the eye of a needle; they did not 
exactly enter into the kingdom of heaven, but 
they did enter by the narrow way of Rotter- 
dam into the kingdom of the poor. Hoover was 
pleased. To be sure, America was not alone in 
generosity, and he has often told us that the 
American contribution was even small com- 
pared to that of Australia. It seemed as if the 
farther countries were removed from the war, 
and the more they felt, or fancied themselves, 
secure, the more they were moved to pity. 

"We had to travel a great deal in the course 
of our work," said Mrs. Vernon, looking at 
her friend Daisy. "How often we saw, far off, 
the smoke from the vessels of the commission, 
and watched them come into the harbor at 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 119 

Rotterdam. The C. R. B. had its offices on the 
docks; its Httle steam-launches went to and 
fro in the estuary of the Meuse; they had 
the commission's own particular flag — indeed, 
they have it still, but one is always tempted 
to speak in the past tense of something in 
which one no longer has a part. 

"Yes, how many times we have watched 
with the director. Captain Lucey, the mooring 
of one of these ships. While he gave his orders 
I looked at the Meuse; its gray, fast-flowing 
stream had passed by Verdun, Dinant, Namur, 
and Liege; and as I thought of the peaceful 
harbors of the Pacific Ocean from which the 
ship had come, I remembered words I had 
heard in a hospital from a little French sol- 
dier: 'The evening that we passed through 
Dinant the Meuse was red because so many 
bodies stabbed with bayonets were bleeding 
in it.' The Meuse was red no longer; it was 
a dull gray, under a low-hanging sky. Weeks 
had passed since the bleeding corpses had 
rolled and drifted out to the eternal oblivion 
of the ocean; the river had forgotten them. 

"While the unloading was going on the 
masters of the Dutch lighters sat waiting on 
benches smoking their long pipes, their feet in 



120 THE SOUL OF THE G. R. B. 

white wooden shoes. Captain Lucey had to 
come to terms with them, for it was on their 
great flat boats that suppHes could get into 
Belgium and France, by way of the canals. 
Little by little the C. R. B. had to lease three 
hundred of these barges, as it had been 
obliged, after the first gift ships, to form its 
own fleet. It thus became a little neutral 
power whose merchant marine was protected 
by international agreements. In the harbor of 
Rotterdam there was always a crowd to see 
the boats of the commission come in, largely 
made up of boys and girls full of curiosity 
about the war, for whom these supplies which 
were to go into the forbidden country be- 
hind the barbed-wire barriers had a some- 
what fearful attraction. The Dutch fisher- 
men, also curious, stood silently on their 
fishing-smacks, stopping their work and look- 
ing gravely on, as if the big vessel, bedecked 
with streamers, was part of a funeral. In- 
vaded Belgium and France were so near 
that it was as though a dead body lay in an 
adjoining room. 

"On the day of our arrival at Rotterdam a 
ship had just been unloaded in two days and 
a half, and we saw the lighters being filled. 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 121 

The Dutch masters and our delegates counted 
and verified the sacks together, then the 
barges were covered with big tarpauHns, with 
the well-known initials of the commission 
painted on them in huge letters. The tarpau- 
lins were then sealed, the seals to remain in- 
tact until the load should arrive at its destina- 
tion, and then only to be broken in the pres- 
ence of one or several of the thirty young 
Americans who were divided between the cen- 
tres of distribution in Belgium and France. 

"And so, the next day, we saw thirty light- 
ers going peacefully up the Meuse, one after 
another. The Germans allowed food to enter, 
but they kept the railways for the transfer of 
troops and munitions; they were the arteries 
of their formidable war circulation. They al- 
lowed us, however, to make use of the canals, 
and we liked to think of their beneficent net- 
work — ^Dutch, Flemish, and French; the trac- 
ery of tranquil waterways, bordered by elms, 
poplars, and aspens, reflecting from one gen- 
eration to another the placid life of ancient 
countries. Later, when we were living in the 
dreary invaded districts, it gave us almost an 
illusion of peace to see the barges come float- 
ing down." And here Mrs. Vernon stopped 



122 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

and looked half-timidly at Morton, as women 
sometimes do when they have betrayed emo- 
tion in speaking of a subject which men are 
in the habit of treating with composure, as a 
matter of business. 

"You don't say anything, Morton," she 
went on. "Do you think I am too sentimental 
about our C.R. B. .?" 

"Not in the least," said Morton. "Quite the 
contrary. After all, is not the whole of this 
war a question of sentiment ? And is it possi- 
ble for us, who know what we are talking 
about, to call attention too often to the dan- 
ger which still threatens the invaded coun- 
tries ? There are no longer any Americans to 
take charge of and distribute supplies; Dutch 
and Spanish delegates have taken our places 
since America went into the war. That change 
in itself is not very important; but a change 
is possible which would make an incalculable 
difference. If there were any lack of money to 
buy the food, if the vessels of the C. R. B. 
could no longer go to Rotterdam, if the canals 
should freeze over in winter, and if then, for 
instance, the Germans refused to allow the 
railways to be used, the immediate result 
would be not hunger alone but famine. Death 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 123 

would hover over the whole of Belgium, and 
even more especially over the invaded parts of 
France. The life of the inhabitants of those 
regions hangs by a thread. It is certainly 
allowable to speak of sentiment/' he continued 
with warmth, ''when one has seen that possi- 
bility as we have. Those who have to live in 
the invaded country are still perforce mute; 
you will only know later all that they have 
had to undergo. In order to help them to keep 
the little spark of life which is in them still, we 
have been forced to be very calm and cold, 
forced to inject clearness and method into our 
dealings with problems which called primarily 
for sentiment. Hoover said to us over and 
over again: 'There is only one way in which 
you American delegates can do your duty, 
and that is by ignoring the war. You are only 
stewards of grain, of bacon, and of dried peas. 
It is your business to see that they arrive 
safely, to count and weigh them accurately, 
and to make sure that they reach the mouths 
for which they were intended.' And what 
looked so big when, as Mrs. Vernon says, 
fleets of ships left American ports and strings 
of barges went up the canals, looked very 
little when the seals were taken from the tar- 



124 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

paulins, the sacks opened, and the manna 
had to be distributed among nine miUions of 
hungry mouths. And we had to be very stingy 
stewards; if we had brought into the invaded 
district more than what was called 'the ration 
necessary to sustain life/ our work would 
have been looked at askance, and we should 
have given offense." 

*'But to whom ?" said Daisy. 

"To every one. It happened to us what in-- 
evitably happens to those who are called upon 
to play a part in a great conflict, without being 
on one side or the other. The Germans, with 
whom we had necessarily frequent relations, 
reproached us bitterly for sending munitions 
to the Allies; when they saw our depots full 
of stores, our soup-kitchens and canteens, our 
supplies for the sick poor in the hospitals, 
they spoke of the hunger in Germany because 
of the British blockade. They said: 'You are 
no longer neutrals; you are keeping alive hos- 
tages whose sufferings might otherwise affect 
the hearts and the fighting power of our ene- 
mies; by keeping the conquered alive you are 
hindering us from making the war hard and 
therefore short. It is you who are prolonging 
it.^ 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 125 

"And when we went to England or France 
to beg for money and for vessels — ^for after a 
time it became necessary to ask the govern- 
ments to take a hand in the vast business — 
well, we found that the Allies also looked at us 
coldly. Here in France they said to us: 'By all 
the laws of war it is the Germans who should 
be called upon to feed the inhabitants of the 
districts which they have invaded. The enemy 
has installed himself in part of our country, 
and governs it. Everything which we send into 
those districts is like a present given outright 
to the Germans, for if we feed nine millions 
of Belgians and French, there is just so much 
more food left for nine millions of Germans. 
You are interfering with the blockade, and 
taking ships which might be used to bring us 
munitions — ^you are only delightful philan- 
thropists.' And they said what the Germans 
had done, only with infinitely more grace and 
polish, holding out their hands in sincere 
friendship: 'You are delightful philanthro- 
pists, but you are prolonging the war.' 

" Prolonging the war ! The same bitter and 
disturbing criticism came from both sides; 
both parties had come to the same conclusion. 
Doubt sometimes entered our own minds — 



126 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

was it really true that we were making the 
war last longer ? If we had not intervened, 
would the Germans have fed the people under 
their yoke ? Was it true that our barges on 
your canals were bringing relief to the Ger- 
mans and not to the French civilians ? We 
heard many heated discussions upon the sub- 
ject, many theories as to the war which 
seemed almost convincing. . . . But when we 
had come away, and were facing realities, in- 
stead of merely talking about them, our own 
conclusion was always the same. The Ger- 
mans would not have fed either the Belgian 
or the French population. If there had been 
no blockade they might perhaps have ob- 
served the 'laws of war,' but as it was, they 
said: 'What ! we ourselves are short of food as 
we have never been before; famine is one of 
the weapons used against us, and our enemies 
have more faith in it than in the strength of 
their arms — and shall we deprive ourselves of 
what was grown on German soil, and is our 
own, in order to feed our enemies ? Is that the 
way to make war — or, at any rate, this war of 
ours ? Are civilians not to be allowed to die, 
although German soldiers must ? ' 

*'We repeated this German reasoning in 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 127 

London, and sometimes in Paris; in the oiBEices 
of cabinet ministers and also in drawing- 
rooms. You have many very charming young 
women here, and their hearts are not hard, 
but their love of country made them feel that 
we were in the wrong, and they usually said : 
'In the end it is the Germans who are the 
gainers by your work.' 

''Well!" said Morton energetically, "I 
know it — we all know it" — and he looked at 
his companions. "The Germans would not 
have fed the civilians of France and Belgium 
from their slender store — or, rather, to be 
more accurate, I will agree that they would 
have fed those who were willing to work for 
them, for their war — they would have been put 
in the same class as the German civilians; but 
as for supporting the men and women who 
resolutely refused to work — ^never ! Here you 
do not know the whole situation; there are 
many things that could not be real to you un- 
less you had actually seen them. For instance, 
you cannot picture the brutal irritation of a 
German officer when he is met by the passive 
resistance of a refusal to work. We have seen 
— or, rather, we have heard of (for we were 
not allowed to see them) — men who had so re- 



128 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

fused being brought to the Kommandatur, and 
from there ordered off to be kept in ditches 
half full of water until their spirit was broken 
and they were willing to go to work. Ask the 
men and women who have been repatriated ! 
You will hear direct testimony then. Women 
who refused to do manual labor for the Ger- 
man officials were obliged to stand upright in 
empty and unheated rooms until they also 
were willing to give in. Through uncurtained 
windows they could look into an adjoining 
room; sewing-machines stood ready there, a 
chair in front of each. It is needless to multi- 
ply instances. Your ears will be filled with 
them as soon as your repatriated people come 
back, and you will believe them more readily 
than you would me, for you will see in their 
faces how much they have suffered. The set- 
tled conviction of all of us who have lived 
with the Germans, and who do not look upon 
them as altogether the Beast of the Apoca- 
lypse, but just as Germans with two legs like 
ourselves — our conviction is that the daily 
bread which we brought, and which is still 
being given every day in Belgium and in 
France, is in a manner the last bread of a 
final last freedom. Can you believe that a 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 129 

man is really free to give or to refuse his work 
to his masters when he lacks even the humble 
daily loaf, when he has to see the faces of his 
wife and children pinched with hunger ? There 
is one sort of hunger that one does not often 
see because it is soon put an end to by death. 
All that is a tragic fact which crowds out of 
our minds the various theories as to the cus- 
toms and even the 'laws' of war. The Belgian 
and Frenchman, if kept alive by us, was free 
to work or not as he chose. Even if he had to 
stand in the ditch half full of water, he knew 
that his wife and the children would have 
some bread and rice, and a little bacon. Here 
at home when you have given war allowances, 
when you have been slow in enforcing restric- 
tions (I mean no reproach), when you have 
not wanted to disturb but keep the families 
of soldiers contented, was it not because you 
wished that your soldier might be free .? — free 
of soul, to fight without a backward look. 
You have given allowances to the wives and 
mothers of your fighting men; why is that ? 
Because the man under arms is sacred to you, 
and that is only justice to him. His wife and 
family may stay in lodgings for which they are 
not forced to pay; you give them fuel and food.* ' 



130 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

"Do you remember/' said Mrs. Vernon, 
"that in the gospel Our Lord rebuked the 
young man who looked behind him ? When I 
was in Belgium and France I often thought of 
how Christ had put into the Lord's Prayer 
the words 'Give us this day our daily bread.' 
He himself fed his disciples, now by the mira- 
cle of the wine at the Marriage of Cana, now 
by the bread when the crowd hearing him was 
anhungered, and again by the miraculous 
draft of fishes which Peter and John took 
from the Sea of Galilee. It is the part of the 
master to feed his people — and he who would 
win the heart must also care for the body's 
needs. There is a spiritual bond between the 
giver of bread and the man to whom it is given 
— ^we did not say that to those who disagreed 
with us; they might have called us 'delightful 
evangelists,' after having called us 'delightful 
philanthropists.' But these are points of view 
which we may acknowledge as we sit here by 
the fireside, friends together, resting after a 
long task, and wishing, as we look back on 
what is past, to see clearly and comprehen- 
sively." And then she added, with a shade of 
timidity: "Please excuse my evangelical di- 
gression. " 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 131 

''It was very welcome," said Morton. ''We 
cannot have too many points of view. But to 
go back to what I was saying — the Germans, 
once their army was fed, would not have taken 
bread out of the mouths of German women 
and children to hand it over to French chil- 
dren whose fathers refused to work. They 
would have carried out a final ' atrocity ' with 
the complacency of Pharisees, justifying it in 
their own eyes, as they had done in other cases, 
by saying: 'It was the fault of the people 
themselves — ^we offered them plenty of food 
if they would work, but they refused.' This 
refusal to work was the outward manifesta- 
tion of a resistance which forced their masters 
to be continually aware that their power had 
a limit. Even if, in particular cases, the will of 
an obstinate 'rebel' broke under the sufferings 
to which he was subjected, the general resis- 
tance continued. 

"We have seen the women who would not 
sew sacks to hold earth for the protection of 
the German trenches; poor 'rebels,' with hag- 
gard looks and colorless lips; their only rebel- 
lion was to fold the thin hands which had 
once worked so diligently and were now weak 
from hunger. It gave them new courage to 



132 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

know that they and their children would not 
be obliged to eat German bread. 

"And, after all/' Morton went on, appar- 
ently somewhat afraid lest he might have 
been too much carried away by what he was 
saying, "those differences of opinion seem al- 
most as remote as the old scholastic disputes; 
it matters little now how the supplies came; 
we had many anxious moments, but the 
C. R. B. managed somehow to find the neces- 
sary millions, the ships, and the supplies. In 
the darkest hours, when we had begun to 
whisper 'famine' to one another — as you 
know we did, Chevrillon — ^the tension broke, 
and the wheat arrived." 

"Then your C. R. B. is the phoenix of the 
war," said Daisy. 

"You may well say so," said Morton. "She 
sprang up from her ashes not once but a 
dozen times, and, as Hoover has told you, we 
were able to see that the flour, or rather the 
bread, reached the mouths for which it was 
intended. Then the Germans blamed us again, 
turning their grievance another way round by 
saying: 'Since you feed these people who will 
not work for us, you are taking their part 
against us.'" Morton rose and stretched his 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 133 

arms with a gesture of infinite relief: "Thank 
God we are neutrals no longer ! — ^neutrality is 
a poor job for any man." 

He sat down again and took from his pocket 
a small printed sheet, which he unfolded care- 
fully and laid upon the table. 

"You have all seen facsimiles of the posters, 
meant to terrorize the French and Belgians, 
which the Germans stuck up on the walls of 
the Town Halls wherever they went; the words 
^ Death,* 'Shooting,' were always conspicuous, 
and we became quite used to their threats. 
But perhaps you may not have seen this little 
notice; it is very small, modestly white, and 
altogether mild-looking; it speaks with the in- 
sidious voice of Mephistopheles, breathing 
temptation in a whisper. It is addressed to the 
workers in the Belgian mines, and invites 
them to go to Germany, to work in factories 
there. Each workman is promised twenty 
francs before he starts, all his expenses are to 
be paid, and on his arrival he will receive the 
same wages as German workmen of the same 
class. Furthermore, sums varying from eighty 
to a hundred and twenty francs a month, ac- 
cording to the number of his children, are 
promised to his family during his absence. 



134 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

His household is to be protected and looked 
after by the Kommandatur, the first payment 
to be made three days after the head of the 
family has left." 

We passed the crumpled bit of paper from 
one to the other. It looked as deadly as the 
big green and red posters which used to glare 
at the Belgians and French like bale-fires 
from the doorways of the Kommandaturs. 

On the table, scattered among blue reports 
bristling with figures, were various proclama- 
tions, valuable as testimony, which had been 
smuggled out of France and Belgium by trav- 
ellers whose names, for obvious reasons, were 
withheld. The first, dated from Brussels in 
October, 1915, announced that death-sen- 
tences had been pronounced by a court mar- 
tial on three men and three women, for "or- 
ganized treason" on their part, and after the 
list of the condemned came the words: "'In 
the cases of Bancq* and Edith Cavell, sen- 
tence already has been carried out." 

"It is an unheard-of use of the word *trea- 
son,' " said Daisy. "One only * betrays' one's 
country or a friend. Are you sure the word 
* treason' was correctly translated ?" 

.* Wrongly spelt in proclamation; his name was Baucq. 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 135 

''You forget," said Morton, "that these 
proclamations were printed in French." 

"So they were," said Daisy. "Sometimes I 
ask myself whether I am awake or dreaming, 
whether I have not lived another life before 
this one, and if these Germans can really be 
of the same race as those whom I have seen at 
the theatre in Berlin, aroused to enthusiasm 
over the old-time independence of Flanders. I 
remember the applause when Egmont, wak- 
ened at dawn in his prison-cell at Brussels, sat 
upright, listened quietly to the sentence con- 
demning him to death 'for treason,' and then 
said to Silva: 'Go tell thy father that he 
neither deceives me nor the world' — 'das er 
weder mich noch die Welt belugt.' And we 
learned Egmont's last words at school. When 
he was about to die he said: 'I give my life 
for the cause of liberty. Enemies surround you 
on every side, but be of good cheer, my friends, 
for your fathers and mothers, your wives and 
children, are behind you. A cruel edict of their 
masters may oppress their bodies, but it can- 
not crush their souls. For the sake of all you 
hold most dear, follow my example and die 
with a high heart.'" 

She quoted these words in a low voice, as 



136 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

if sending her memory back to lier school-days 
in order to recollect what Goethe had put into 
the mouth of another prisoner at Brussels, 
and added: "Goethe and Schiller, the true 
heroes of German thought, bore witness long 
ago in Germany, and for the German people, 
to the greatness of the men and women who 
are waked in their prisons to-day to hear that 
they are to die 'for treason.' " 

PROCLAMATION 

The Tribunal of the Imperial German War Council, 
sitting at Brussels, has pronounced the following sen- 
tences : 

Condemned to death, for organized treason: 
Edith Cavell, teacher at Brussels. 
Philippe Bancq, architect at Brussels. 
Jeanne de Belleville, of Montignies. 
Louise Thuiliez,* professor at Lille. 
Louis Severin, pharmacist at Brussels, 
Albert Libiez, lawyer at Mons. 
Condemned to fifteen years' hard labor for the same 
reason : 
Hermann Capiau, engineer at Wasmes. 
Ada BoDART, at Brussels. 
Georges Derveau, pharmacist at Paturages. 
Mary de Croy, at Bellignies. 
During the same session the War Council pronounced 
* Her name was Thuliez. 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 137 

sentences of imprisonment and of hard labor, varying 
in length from two to eight years, on seventeen other 
prisoners accused of treason against the Imperial 
Armies. 

In the cases of Bancq and Edith Cavell, sentence 
has been already carried out. 

The Governor-General of Brussels calls the atten- 
tion of the public to these facts, in order that they may 
serve as a warning. 

General Von Bissing, 
Governor of the City. 

Brussels, October 12, 19 15. 

PROCLAMATION 
OF THE German Military Commander of Lille 

The attitude of England makes feeding the popula- 
tion increasingly difficult. 

In order to lessen suffering, the German authorities 
recently asked for volunteers to work in the fields. 
This offer did not meet with the success which was 
expected. 

It is therefore ordered that the inhabitants shall be 
evacuated and moved into the country. They will be 
sent into the occupied territory in France, far behind 
the front, where they will be engaged in agriculture, 
and not in work for the armies. 

By this means they will have an opportunity to pro- 
vide for themselves. 

In case of necessity they may be fed from the Ger- 
man depots. 

Each person evacuated may take with him 30 kilo- 



138 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

grams weight of baggage (kitchen utensils, clothing, 
etc.), which he will do well to prepare at once. 

I therefore order that, until further notice, no one 
shall change his domicile. Furthermore, no one shall 
leave his legal domicile between 9 o'clock at night and 
6 o'clock in the morning (German time), unless he is 
provided with a proper permit so to do. 

As this measure is irrevocable it will be for the inter- 
est of the population to remain quiet and submissive. 

The Commander. 
Lille, April, 191 6. 

"Goethe and Schiller/' said Morton, "be- 
longed still to the small Germany of separate 
states. It was by their thought, and not by 
force of arms, that they wished to influence 
the world. But do not let us consider the 
poets; there is no question of poetry now, nor 
of an heroic past. Everything is ^the present' 
and 'reality.' Here is something else," he said, 
taking from among the scattered papers a 
large green poster, quite new, as if it had only 
come from the printer that morning. "Here is 
a 'notice' of which you have heard a great 
deal; a 'notice' does not seem very important. 
This one was posted up at Lille; look at the 
date," and he pointed to it: "'April, 1916.' It 
was on Easter Sunday that this paper was 
placarded on the doors. In the suburbs of 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 139 

Roubaix the German soldiers were sticking 
it up hurriedly on almost every door." 
We read : 

NOTICE 

All inmates of this house, excepting old men and 
women, and children under fourteen with their mothers, 
must get ready to be deported within an hour and a half. 

An officer will have the final decision as to those who 
are to be taken to the assembly camps. In order that 
he may do so, all the inmates of the house shall stand 
together outside it; in case of bad weather they will be 
allowed to stand in the entry, the house-door to be 
kept open. No protests will be considered. No inmate 
of the house, including those who are not to be de- 
ported, may leave it before eight o'clock in the morn- 
ing (German time). 

Each person shall have the right to 30 kilograms 
weight of baggage; in case of overweight, that person's 
baggage will be rejected without further consideration. 
The baggage of each person must be in a separate par- 
cel, with a legible address firmly affixed thereto; such 
address to consist of the owner's name in full and the 
number of his identification card. 

It is absolutely necessary that each person shall pro- 
vide himself with utensils for eating and drinking, as 
well as a woollen blanket, stout shoes, and undercloth- 
ing. Each person must wear his identification card. 
Any one attempting to avoid deportation will be rigor- 
ously punished. -r- t^ 

Etappen-Kommandatur. 

Lille, April, 19 16. 



140 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Morton put the two notices side by side, so 
that we could see them at the same time, the 
one promising good wages and the fostering 
care of the authorities for the household of 
the absent worker, the other ordering whole- 
sale deportations. 

"You see both their methods," he said. 
"They were followed at the same time, and 
by the hardship of one you may judge of the 
temptation offered by the other." 

"But they must be demons," said Mrs. 
Felder, and she pronounced the word as if it 
came from the depths of her soul. It was the 
first time she had spoken during the evening; 
her soft eyes, which were sometimes those of 
a seercss, had been fixed on Morton. 

"This, then," she went on, "is what you 
have seen in France, in the country which we 
have considered as our brother, in the coun- 
try of liberty ! Did you actually see these de- 
portations ?" 

"Certainly," said Mrs. Vernon. "For my 
own part, I had seen one day, a long time 
ago, at Marrakech, in an out-of-the-way cor- 
ner of the bazaars, a trader bringing in his 
new riches — a troop of slaves, men, women, 
and young girls. I thought then I had never 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 141 

in my life seen anything more inhuman; but 
now it seems to me only Hke a sort of biblical 
vision of primitive Oriental life, since we have 
seen, in a great industrial city of France, Ger- 
man officers, with waxed mustaches and pol- 
ished boots, dragging Frenchwomen toward 
the railway-stations — Frenchwomen who had 
been torn from their families and homes on 
that Easter night. 

"In the country we sometimes met a little 
procession of these deported ones. The poor 
souls were very quiet, very simple — ^it was 
from them we learned to speak calmly when 
our hearts were on fire. Their heavy feet shuf- 
fled in the dust; their backs were bent under 
the weight of their burdens; their thoughts 
were only of their misery. Some of the women 
were crying. We stopped our motor-cars, and 
they looked at us anxiously as they went by, 
as if hoping that we might be able to help 
them. They could not. know, as they saw us 
watching them with calm curiosity from our 
carriages, that we, the witnesses of their woe, 
would raise a cry of horror and condemnation 
which would for the first time intimidate their 
oppressors and check this revival of slavery. 

**For it was an American named Poland, 



142 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

one of the heads of our C. R. B., who was the 
first to shame the German mihtary leaders 
out of these deportations. When he first pro- 
tested against them to one of the generals 
high in authority at the General Head- 
quarters, this chief pretended that he did not 
believe such tales. 'They were due to the 
heated imagination of neutrals; all philan- 
thropists were alarmists; we saw persecution 
everywhere.' The general ordered an investi- 
gation, and Poland saw the officers who had 
taken part in the deportations and signed the 
'notices' deny them pointblank, or else have 
conveniently hazy recollections. When Poland 
finally pushed them to the wall, and they had 
to confess what they had done, the general 
was, or made believe to be, very angry, and 
not long after that the order was revoked both 
in the occupied zone and in that where the 
army was in movement. Freedom within their 
own households, that last treasure of the op- 
pressed, was given to your fellow country- 
men; the mother might keep her daughter, the 
daughter stay with her mother. But when the 
sons reached the age at which all mothers, at 
all times, have been proud of their boys, then 
for them came deportation." 

"We have been so absorbed in watching 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 143 

the sudden turns of fortune in the fighting," 
said Daisy, *'that we have thought less about 
what we could not see, what was going on 
behind a wall; we have not known enough 
^bout the suffering back of the lines." 

"The wall is forbidding," said Morton, "for- 
bidding and well guarded, and once within 
the walled territory there are yet other en- 
closures. In going from Belgium to Holland, 
as one crosses a strip of empty land, fenced on 
either side with a latticework of barbed wire 
and electrified cables one feels already a 
prisoner. For those of us who were newcom- 
ers, having only landed at Rotterdam that 
same morning, the impression was very strik- 
ing. German sentinels, carrying their rifles, 
and with pistols in their belts, paced to and 
fro in the strip of flat, damp country, guard- 
ing the wires charged with instant death to 
any touch. It is a hunting-ground which is 
uncommonly well preserved ; the sentinel, who 
comes with his hand at the salute to examine 
our passports, will open the barriers for us if 
he finds them in order, but one has left free- 
dom behind." 

"And yet," said Mrs. Vernon, "that is only 
occupied territory." 

"Yes," said Morton. "It is a bit of Belgium 



144 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

which is still divided into provinces. Fifty- 
thousand Germans are enough to 'hold' the 
country; they 'occupy' it, they keep watch, 
they arrest patriots and condemn them to 
death. To them the young Belgians who try 
to pass the barriers in order to fight are 
game-birds of war, to be slain with the deadly 
electric current. We have known of boys 
caught like sparrows in a net — ^that happens 
every day. All this is terrible enough, and yet 
it is only 'occupation.' If one goes from 
Belgium into France, as we did each week, 
the impression was different again. Near the 
frontier there was another zone to be passed, 
more sentinels pacing the fields. There we 
came into the 'zone of action,' in which 
two millions and a half of German soldiers 
prepared for and made war in a territory in- 
habited by two millions and a half of French 
people. The numbers were even. In Belgium 
a gap had been made in the beginning, and the 
track of the invasion was marked by ruins, 
but it was on the land of France, divided into 
as many compartments as there were German 
armies holding them, that the torrent over- 
flowed. Etappen-Gehiet — ^the word sounds like 
the crack of a pistol. The air of liberty is so 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 145 

rarefied that one can scarcely breathe; just 
think of it — of all the German armies in- 
trenched or fighting, with their van and rear 
guards, crowded into this broken-oflf corner of 
France. There is not a village, no matter how 
small and how far behind the German lines, 
which has not its German cantonment — ^its 
German soldiers billeted on Frenchmen — or on 
Frenchwomen. They are everywhere. For each 
Frenchman there is a German under arms — 
the count is easily made — and this at a time 
and in a war in which every method of pres- 
sure has been carefully studied and pitilessly 
applied. Belgium could sometimes mock her 
'occupiers' with the brave laugh of the weak- 
ling who turns the giant into ridicule — ^but in 
the 'zone of action' in France no one evef 
laughed. Let us put it in another way — ^there 
were two suspicious German eyes spying on 
every French man, woman, or child. Those 
eyes saw everything — ^in that, as in everything 
else, the German thought himself godlike — and 
punishment might follow a laugh, a smile, or 
even a shrug of the shoulders. 

"We ourselves were not free in the zone of 
action. We found friends among the Belgians, 
and the close community of our work allowed 



146 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

US to know them well. They used to ask us to 
dine with them sometimes at the week-ends, 
and when our work was done we sometimes 
played tennis on their lawns with their daugh- 
ters. Even during the most tragic experience 
every hour is not sad. 

^' But in the French zone of action we could 
have no friends. Various sign-boards showed 
us that we were in the empire of destruction 
as soon as we came into it. For instance, a 
very polite German officer got into our rail- 
way-carriage and took possession of us. It 
had been agreed that we were to superintend 
in all centres of distribution, but we were 
superintendents who were superintended — ^we 
were suspects. Each of us had a German officer 
as a constant companion. We called him our 
'nurse'; we also called him our ^man Friday,' 
for we felt like Robinson Crusoe on his desert 
island. We could never speak to a Frenchman 
freely or alone; the big ears of the German 
officer were always wide open. In the course 
of our rounds we passed the night in the same 
hotel with him, and sometimes in the same 
room; we took our meals at the same table; 
at the meetings of the French committees the 
German officer never left our side. We were as 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 147 

inseparable as a man and his shadow. We 
were young, and we were not there to grum- 
ble. As long as the Germans kept their word 
and did not lay hands on any of the imported 
wheat, it was our business to keep silent. It 
was also part of our instructions from Hoover : 
'You have nothing to do there except to see 
that the wheat arrives, that it is made into 
bread, and the bread eaten by those for whom 
it was meant. If it is hard to say nothing, 
remember that silence is the price of food for 
those people.' 

"I remember arriving once in the little vil- 
lage of . When I had last seen it, a month 

before, it was intact beside its river, but when 
our motor-car stopped that morning in the 
square in front of the church, I saw that three 
houses had just been burned down; their cal- 
cined walls had fallen in. Some women who 
were beating their linen at the public washing- 
place turned their heads away when they 
caught sight of the German uniform. With my 
'Friday' we made our visits to the president 
of the French committee, at the communal 
storehouse. We counted the sacks of flour 
which had been received the night before, and 
we looked into houses here and there to see if 



148 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

our distributions had been regularly made. 
Everything took place as if the village did not 
bear the marks of recent violence. I tried to 
surprise some expression on the faces of the 
French committee, but they were gloomy and 
strained; they only spoke of trifling matters 
relating to the food supply. As for me, I had 
no right to put any questions; I was restricted 
to a vocabulary which would go into two pages 
of a Berlitz manual: 

"'Have you received the supplies ?' 
" 'How many sacks were there ? ' 
"'Have you returned the sacks ?' 
"'Have you destroyed the tin boxes ?* 
"There were some moments of silence which 
seemed suffocating. Through the window I 
could see the breaches in what had been, but 
a month before, a charming square of houses 
around the church. That particular day 'my 
officer' did not leave me for an instant, and 
when we met some women, as we went out, I 
saw his blue eyes looking hard at them. His 
glance was like the glint of a bayonet. The 
women passed silently, and I felt that they 
were like wounded animals who are unable to 
tell why they suffer. 

"When we were back again In the motor, 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 149 

between the two soldiers with their loaded 
rifles who occupied its corners, my officer lit a 
cigar. He had become affable and altogether 
human again. The fresh air, the swift motion 
of the car, the ending of a task, all combined 
to put him in a good humor, and he said to 
me: *If you are not on duty to-morrow we 
might have some shooting, if you like. Thanks 
to our excellent organization, the game has not 
been molested; there are plenty of partridges 
in these fields.' 

"'Perhaps,' I said; 'but tell me, W., what 
happened at ?' 

"'Oh, only a punitive measure,' he an- 
swered, and his face again assumed the hard 
expression that it had worn during our visit, 
as he puffed hard at his cigar. I never found 
out why those three houses were set on fire, 
but later I became familiar with such 'acci- 
dents.' Now it was a house, or a little group 
of houses, which were missing in a village; 
again it was a few men, or women, or priests. 
... In the small town of N. we found the 
room empty in which the president of the 
local committee, who was also the mayor, 
usually received us. Our meeting took place 
in a neighboring room, without any allusion 



150 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

to the absence of the president, but there, at 
any rate, we found out through a notice 
posted on the wall of the town hall that he 
had been condemned to death 'for treason.' 
The time is not yet come when we may speak 
more openly, but let us remember that in that 
part of the world men and women are only 
hostages. Sometimes as an act of clemency the 
penalty of death is commuted to hard labor. 
"I heard afterward that Monsieur X. was 
already serving his sentence in Germany, 
among common criminals, with his head 
shaven and wearing the convict's jacket and 
cap, marked with his prison number. He was 
plaiting baskets for German shells, and at 
night he was locked into a cage made of iron 
bars. But we only knew that later; the only 
answer at the time was 'a punitive measure.' 
Another time it was a cure who had disap- 
peared; for those who are invaded have their 
'missing' as well as the troops; he also had 
been condemned to death by a court martial 
'for treason,' the sentence being commuted 
into penal servitude in Germany. In his spir- 
itual capacity he had helped his parishioners 
to solve a difficult case of conscience — ought 
one to take one's copper to the Kommandatur 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 151 

or not ? The old cure said from the pulpit at 
high mass: 'Resistance is impossible; when 
they come to your house, let them take what 
they can find — ^but/ said the old man gently, 
Mo not let them find more than you can help/ 
His flock understood him, and during the night 
all their saucepans and ancient warming-pans 
were buried or thrown into the Meuse. The 
old priest was caught in the act of wheeling 
his own coppers through the woods on a bar- 
row, in the path to the river. I knew that 
through my 'Friday,' who was so indignant 
about the 'traitor' that he spoke out for once. 
Riveted as we were to each other, sometimes 
by night as well as by day, we used to talk; 
we only escaped from this Siamese life on 
Thursdays, when we went to make our report 
at our committee meetings in Brussels, which 
left us six days of the week in which to hear 
and discuss German theories about the Ger- 
man race. The 'Fridays' might be changed 
but the theories never; our oflScers loved to 
intoxicate themselves with their own beliefs, 
as a fanatic repeats his formula to himself 
over and over. By finding the same ideas in- 
cessantly reiterated in their newspapers, their 
pamphlets, their books, and their conversa- 



152 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

tions, one comes to know that the German 
brain is an anvil for German thought. 

"You say in your newspapers that they are 
barbarians, but you are mistaken, as our 
friend Harder told you the other day; this war 
has taught us that they are Germans. The 
difference is great. The barbarian was a big 
child in a world of shadows, but these men 
see very clearly what they destroy and why 
they destroy it. First it is the riches of a 
country, then the source of that riches, men, 
land, and machinery. We have seen them 
calmly seated, resting themselves and reason- 
ing about the war, their future zukunft, their 
harshness and their punitive measures, while 
they drank the wines of France temperately 
and with appreciation. I have watched them 
as they followed up their forecasts, striking 
the table with their fists until the glasses 
danced upon the trays. They would say to us 
in English: 'And if it is not this time, it will 
be next time, and if not next time, then the 
time after.' You may as well be prepared, for 
they have plenty of patience. If man is a vague 
and changeable being, then the German is not 
a man. 

"During our table-talk we Robinson Cru- 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 153 

soes became fairly satiated with their ideas 
of the selection and superiority of the Teu- 
tonic race. Nothing could be feebler than 
these bold paradoxes strained through ordi- 
nary German minds, always followed by abuse 
of the Americans: 'We were furnishing France 
with munitions'; 'we were no longer neutral'; 
'we were prolonging the war.' There were 
some lively arguments at our dinner-tables. 
We have seen the entry of the United States 
into the war; we have also discussed it before- 
hand. They would never believe in it; until the 
very last day they thought it was only our 
American bluff. 'It would be a crime/ they 
said; 'it would make the war last indefinitely.' 
They were gamblers who thought they had 
won the game; they were quite ready to make 
peace, and to embrace Belgium and after- 
ward France, both of whom they loved, after 
their fashion. They loved France especially, 
but evilly and covetously, as a brutal man 
loves a charming woman who flies from him 
when he comes near her. It was a mixture of 
love and anger. I have often seen them, when 
it was time to rest at the end of one of our 
day-long journeys in summer, taking their 
bitters in front of one of your cafes. They 



154 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

seemed to breathe the air of France with sen- 
sual delight, while they said : ' Poor France ! 
when will the war come to an end ?' During 
our stay with them we often saw long lines of 
carts pass by, drawn by slow and heavy-footed 
Russian prisoners, and surrounded by German 
soldiers. It was a familiar sight on your east- 
ern roads. The carts were laden with tree- 
trunks, smooth and shiny, made green or 
golden by the mosses still clinging to them. 

'"Your French forests went to Germany in 
gangs, under guard, like prisoners, and the 
German officers would repeat: *Poor France !' 
They spoke sincerely, as an executioner who 
knows that nothing will make his hand trem- 
ble might speak of a woman whose beautiful 
hair he has just seen cut off, and who is to be 
delivered to him for torture. Poor France ! 
Sometimes, while these loads of recently felled 
trees were going by, the air was full of the 
smell of their fresh sap, and one could see the 
old French wood-cutters going hurriedly into 
their houses and shutting their doors. . . . 
Then, as if to dispel any unpleasant feeling, 
our officers would call the children who were 
always dawdling on the door-steps, tell them 
funny stories in French, give them bright new 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 155 

pfennigs, pull their ears gently, or pat their 
thick hair. And then, as if to say, ' How easy it 
would be!' they would point to the German 
soldiers off duty and resting, who were grin« 
ning sheepishly at the young women as they 
passed, or even — ^we may speak out, may we 
not ? — dandling paternally in their arms big 
solemn-looking babies . . . the sad children of 
invasion." 

Morton stopped suddenly, as if he were 
afraid he had wounded the intimate national 
feelings of the French people who were listen- 
ing to him. The subject dropped. Mrs. Felder's 
eyes were full of tears; Daisy, usually so ready 
to talk, kept silence; Chevrillon got up to light 
the alcohol lamp in time for tea. 

There was an awkward pause for a moment, 
broken by Mrs. Vernon, who said : 

*'My dear friends, we should not feel that 
we had the right to touch your wounds if we 
had not by coming into the war pledged our- 
selves to heal them. We have been made part 
(I am using on€ of the expressions of your 
church, but when one speaks of France all 
thoughts become religious) — ^we have been 
made part of your suffering, but now we have 
come to unite ourselves with France militant. 



156 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Is it not true, Daisy, that this is the day for 
which we have longed ? and — ^I will speak 
again in terms of religion — ^in order to receive 
the reward of our Redeemer we must have 
shared his Passion. Very many of our boys will 
go into this war as true Christians, feeling 
that a work of redemption must be accom- 
plished, and the whole world delivered from 
evil. You have spoken often of our material 
civilization — ^you will be surprised at the 
amount of idealism to be found among the 
strong and well-grown young men who are 
coming to fight for you. It is strange," she 
went on, as if talking to herself, and trying 
to make a vague idea clear, "it is just the 
reverse of the German conditions, where 
transcendental idealism has led to material- 
ism of the most ferocious kind. But then," 
she went on, as if pushing away a puzzling 
problem, "we also are contradictory. We came 
out here as haters of war, as physicians who 
had been made immune to some terrible 
plague, and were bringing remedies to its 
victims. And now the war has entered into 
our very blood — ^yes, even I, a woman, have 
felt it," and she raised the hem of her sleeve 
from her slender wrist with an instinctive 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 157 

movement, as if to show us the mark of an 
inoculation. "It came to me in invaded 
France; it came to others as they sat here by 
their firesides; it will come to still others in 
America. The haters of war now say to-day: 
'If war can only be destroyed by war, then let 
us throw ourselves into the fight at once.'" 

It was growing late, but we found it hard 
to part. Mrs. Vernon was sailing for home 
the next day, to continue her untiring cam- 
paign for invaded France and Belgium, and 
teach her friends the new gospel of adversity. 

Daisy was going back to her nest in Lor- 
raine. ... At this moment, and while Chevril- 
lon was making tea, Mrs. Felder went to the 
piano. There was a sort of magnetic attrac- 
tion between her and it; she did not sit down, 
but as she passed she stooped over the keys, 
and drew from them very faintly an adagio 
by Cesar F'ranck. 

Mrs. Vernon turned round quickly, saying, 
''Ah, Nettie Bell, do play the first bars !" and 
being gentle and always attuned to music, 
Nettie Bell played them. 

"I heard that for the first time at Lille," 
said Mrs. Vernon. "We had arrived that 
morning, having gone through dead villages 



158 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

the day before, those villages of the French 
countryside from which no smoke ever rises 
now. The wind whistled over the bare plain 
and on the roads where it no longer shook 
white poplars — ^they had also been carried off 
into Germany. I was sad . . . One feels the 
tragic absence of all personal liberty in that 
region more on some days than on others. We 
had stopped before the storehouse of the 
C. R. B., and my husband discussed some 
detail concerning the supplies with a German 
officer. While I was waiting I could look into 
a room on the ground floor of a large house 
across the street; the window-curtains were 
drawn back, so that I saw a young woman 
seated at her piano. 

"She was reading from the open sheet be- 
fore her as she played ; I could have drawn her 
profile, which was very delicate and almost 
too sharply defined. She was in mourning, 
with a small crape scarf drawn around her 
shoulders and crossed on her bosom. A little 
girl about three years old was playing near 
her, and every now and then she interfered 
with her mother's music by tapping on the 
piano with tiny obstinate fingers. It was just 
an ordinary every-day household scene, and 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 159 

yet I understood its inner meaning as I saw 
the wedding-ring, too loose for its wearer's thin 
hand, and the beautiful face which only the 
chisel of suffering could have made so spiri- 
tual. I was sure that in playing what she did, 
and as she rendered it, she was pouring forth 
a prayer of love and sorrow; sometimes she 
played the movement you have just heard 
with force and passion, and then wearily, like 
some one who falls and struggles to her feet 
again; she seemed almost like an angel walking 
uncertainly under a weight of distress. 

"All at once, as the child persisted in 
drumming with her fingers upon the keys, her 
mother stopped playing for an instant and 
very gently pushed the little thing away. 

"She caught sight of me as she did so, and 
noticed that I was looking at her. She was 
evidently frightened. And then I did the only 
thing unbecoming a neutral with which I 
have to reproach myself, I think, during all 
my stay in those sad countries — I pressed my 
finger to my lips and gravely sent her the 
shadowy ghost of a kiss. 

"She started, and for the first time I saw 
her full face. Her large gray eyes, widely 
opened, were two chalices full of tears. I 



160 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

looked at her hand, where her wedding-ring 
hung so loosely, and it was as though she had 
said to me in words : 'This war has made me a 
widow/ 

"She saw the German officer (a very decent 
fellow, by the way, who gave himself no end 
of trouble to help my husband in feeding what 
he called 'my population') and drew herself 
on one side, at the same time pulling the mus- 
lin curtains across the window. 

"That evening, as we were returning in our 
motor along the dark road, we came to the 
crossing of two highways, where there had 
been fighting in 1914; eight French soldiers 
lay buried there, some beside one road and 
some by the other, and their graves were in 
the form of a cross. I could not help thinking 
of the eyes I had seen that morning brimming 
with unshed tears, and I said to my com- 
panion: 'Poor invaded France — we shall have 
seen nothing of her soldiers except their 
graves.' 

'*He answered: 'It is almost impossible to 
believe that fighting is going on all the time; 
a different France is over there, close to us, 
on the other side of the zone of action.' And 
he stretched out his hand. The car rolled on, 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 161 

and we found ourselves close to trenches cut 
across gardens — they always look strangely 
like the sunken roads of Brittany. I thought 
again of the young woman seen only for a 
moment that morning, and I stood up in the 
car in order that I might have a better view 
of the forest of the Argonne on the horizon, 
as if it were possible to see from that distance 
what we Americans in invaded France have 
never yet seen, and what the French people 
who live there never, never see — French 
troops/' 

"I have often had the same feeling," said 
Morton. "Sometimes we could not help suf- 
fering from a dreary delusion that there was 
no more real France, only men who were old 
or ailing, in the midst of a multitude of women 
and children. When its young manhood is 
drained out of a country it loses all vitality — 
and when I say 'young' I mean between a 
period which begins at sixteen and ends at 
forty-five. If only we might have seen, as we 
toiled at our never-ending task of counting 
and weighing sacks of wheat and flour for the 
poor and the sick, for women and children, 
for infirm old people — even for the insane — if 
only we might have suddenly seen a young 



162 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

French soldier, all in horizon-blue, his steel 
helmet on his head, his rifle on his shoulder, 
looking at us with bright eyes " 

"It would have been a wonderful vision," 
said Daisy. 

"Better far than that," said Mrs. Vernon. 
"To those poor French people who are waiting 
there, in the Valley of the Shadow, oppressed 
by a cruel old god — it would have been the 
passing of a young god in his glory." 

"It is perfectly true," said Morton, "that 
the greatest privation of these people immured 
in a German jail is that they can never see 
their own soldiers. They saw the mobilization, 
the movement of their armies toward the east 
and the north — ^they saw them retreat — and 
then night fell — ^the outer darkness — and they 
were left to be the guardians of graves. 

"I was at Lille one night when French avi- 
ators dropped bombs on one of the suburbs. 
When all their bombs had been used up the 
airmen flew over the centre of the city, taking 
no notice of the enemy airplanes which were 
after them. They had thrown bombs to the 
Germans, but on their own French they show- 
ered down myriads of little papers, bright with 
the national colors. It was strictly forbidden 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 163 

to open any windows, under severe penalties, 
but as I stood there in the city square I saw 
them all opened at the same time. The mitrail- 
leuses were crackling, and the women leaning 
out of their windows tried to see their Mes- 
siah in the heavens — ^the airplane soaring on 
its French wings in the cold moonlight. There 
was an old woman whom I had come to know 
well because I used to see her in one of our 
workrooms, always bending over her sewing 
with a patient, tired face. I saw her that night, 
on the fourth floor of the house where she 
lived; she was carrying a little sleeping child, 
and showing him to the bird of France, the 
blessed bird of fire, a shining star in the dark- 
ness, shedding a mystical blessing among the 
din of the mitrailleuses and the droning of the 
planes. Shells were falling and shrapnel was 
scattered in the square, but one felt that a 
universal rejoicing, only half-subdued, was 
flowing from every window into the night." 

"I was right," said Mrs. Vernon. "It was 
the passing of the young god." 

"The next day there were German posters, 
German punishments; women had opened the 
shutters of their windows, allowing rays of 
light to stream out, for which they must be 



164 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

fined. But the French people had had their 
hour of gladness, and they paid their fines 
without a murmur; then the darkness, which 
had Hfted for those blessed moments, closed in 
again, and the long night went on. 

"That is one of the last recollections of my 
stay there," said Morton, "and one of the 
most striking; even now I sometimes recall the 
old woman as she held the sleeping child for 
the airplane to see, when it was only a spark 
of light, scarcely distinguishable among all 
the others. A few days afterward we went 
away; the premonitory symptoms of our entry 
into the war had begun to show themselves, 
and the thirty Americans who ran from one 
end to the other of the territory which held 
six German armies soon became ^undesirable.' 
Our situation was peculiar. Negotiations had 
been begun by which the Dutch and the 
Spanish governments were to take over our 
work and insure the importation and delivery 
of supplies, but in the meantime, and until we 
should be actual belligerents, we went on with 
our inspections, always accompanied by our 
German officers, who were even more closely 
attached to us than before. When I was in 
Morocco I used to amuse myself by watching 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 165 

the white birds which dehberately and pa- 
tiently followed in the track of the laboring 
oxen as they turned up the furrows. The ox 
and the bird — an odd association seen all 
through that country; the birds feed on the 
flies which swarm around the beasts and are 
scattered by the lashing of the ox's tail. No 
white bird was ever more faithful to his chosen 
ox than the German officer was to his particu- 
lar delegate ! The last days of this enforced 
intimacy were rather trying. After our endless 
discussions about the war, the endless German 
theories, and the endless complaints as to our 
having supplied munitions to the Allies, our 
entry into the struggle was dramatic, to say 
the least. The Germans had never really be- 
lieved in our intervention. They knew how 
deep the roots of American life were struck 
into peace and prosperity, and they had 
counted on their influence in the United States, 
on their propaganda, and on the inoculation 
of Germanism which would be 'biologically' 
developed by the dissemination of ten mil- 
lions of Germans throughout the length and 
breadth of our country. Even when our inter- 
vention became certain, even at the present 
time, it is hard for them to admit to them- 



166 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

selves that we are really going in for serious 
fighting with artillery and rifles. President 
Wilson's action when he declared war seemed 
to them as if a far-away Supreme Being, ab- 
sent-mindedly holding the scales in which right 
and wrong are weighed, had frowned on mor- 
tals as a sign of his displeasure, without mean- 
ing to descend to earth in order to follow his 
condemnation by chastisement. That would 
all be settled in some other world. Neverthe- 
less, although they could not believe in the 
possibility of improvising American armies, as 
it had taken them forty years of preparation 
to get their own ready, they knew that the 
United States had decided against them, and 
they felt the weight of this moral judgment. 
They were quiet up to the end, and so were 
we; it was their duty and ours also, but we 
discussed and argued persistently, and when 
the last evening came, we drank with calm 
solemnity the health of him who should be the 
first among us to be made a prisoner of war. 
"After that our work was turned over to 
the Dutch delegates who were to take our 
places. The last time that I met with a French 
committee was in a village on the banks of 
the Meuse. Everything went on just as it had 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 167 

done before; I am not even sure that the 
French knew we had gone into the war, for the 
German newspapers kept the announcement 
back as long as they possibly could. The presi- 
dent of the committee declared the meeting 
adjourned in the usual words, which had be- 
come a sort of ritual, and when I went back to 

I saw our barges once more coming 

slowly down the canal in a long line. One of 
the features of our administration was its ab- 
sence of noise and fuss; those barges, with their 
sealed tarpaulins, gliding silently along the 
waterways, keeping their own secrets and 
going quietly to their destination, were fitting 
symbols of the system by means of which we 
had managed to sustain life in the suffering 
bodies of those who trusted us. 

"And so one day, very calmly, without any 
leave-taking, we passed through the guarded 
lines, like the doors of a jail, where invaded 
France begins and ends. We left the prisoners 
behind us, but only to return to set them free 
by force of arms. From the sinister zone of 
action, swarming with German armies, we 
passed to the zone of occupation, and came to 
the barriers of barbed wire, charged with their 
lightnings. It was evening, and for the last 



168 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

time the German sentinels examined our pa- 
pers by the Hght of their red lamps. 

*^We were in Holland, and could breathe 
the air of freedom. I looked again at the wide, 
flat meadows, shining with moisture, gay with 
blossoming clover and sainfoin, and diversified 
by little thickets here and there. This little 
strip of land would have looked like any other 
in a free country except for the sentry-boxes, 
painted with the German colors, which were 
strung all along the enclosure. The pair of sen- 
tinels, with their hands at the visors of their 
helmets, their stiff, automatic gait, their silent 
politeness, the candid indifference of their 
china-blue eyes, seemed to me like the German 
machine personified.'' 

"You say 'machine,'" said Daisy, "and 
they say that they are * nature ' — ^nature which 
cannot be repressed, and which is impelled by 
its inward vitality to become a devouring 
force." 

"They have a lot of fables and myths for- 
ever in their mouths," said Morton; "argu- 
ments which would become the Lernaean hy- 
dra, paradoxes which are both cynical and 
pagan, and yet they always lay claim to God's 
especial favor. I stick to my word — ^they have 



THE AMERICANS IN THE WAR 169 

a machine — ^I admit that it is formidable, but 
only a machine after all, and sooner or later it 
will explode in their hands. 

"The end had come. We passed the last 
sign-posts . . . there were only our two selves 
in our carriage." 

He rose suddenly and drew a deep breath, 
as if he needed all the air left in the room by 
the many cigarettes which had begun and 
ended their lives there. "Thank God," he said, 
"the C. R. B. still carries on its work — ^but 
we are no longer neutrals !" 



CHAPTER III 

WITH OUR FRIENDS IN THE LIBERATED 
COUNTRY 

JL HE Germans have fallen back. Now we 
shall be able to see with our own eyes the 
country which they overran. The footprints of 
the Beast are still fresh; we shall look into his 
dens, and smell his evil stench. We shall find 
stains of the blood shed by him, and witness 
the destruction he has wrought. It will be an 
intimate satisfaction to our souls to be able 
to hate and curse him more even than before; 
it makes us happy now to be able to hate, as 
happy as we once were in being able to love. 
We were again with our American friends, 
for they wished to see, or rather to revisit, the 
regions in which their work had lain, and with 
which they were once so familiar. Morton and 
Rivards were with me in the automobile, and 
we were going first to Noyon. We reached Sen- 
lis at five o'clock in the afternoon, and an- 
other motor-car, coming from Paris, stopped 
near ours. Two men got out of it; I saw Chev- 
rillon first, as he came toward me with a tall, 

170 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 171 

man, who, although young, looked terribly 
grave. Under his thick hair his brow was 
almost stern; his eyes were keen, his lips un- 
smiling — and, I repeat, he looked terribly 
grave. I had never seen him before, but I knew 
him at once by his photographs; the thin- 
lipped, obstinate mouth, the expression of reti- 
cence and silent strength were eloquent of his 
ancestry. It could only be Hoover, the grand- 
son of Quakers. 

We shook hands without the usual civil 
effusion; I had not even time to get out the 
customary phrase of French politeness: "Mr. 
Hoover, we have heard a great deal about 
you in France.'^ We felt that even those few 
words would have been too many, and were 
quick to take our tone from him. Notwith- 
standing his taciturnity his manner was ex- 
ceedingly courteous; his eyes spoke for him, 
and we understood their language. We were 
at once conscious of the tie that bound us to 
him for what he had done in the past, and felt 
that it would make us one with him and his 
workers in the present and for the future. 

Hoover was only in France for three days, 
on his way to the United States to assume 
control of the food supply; in the meantime 



172 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

he meant, like us, to see some of the French 
towns and villages which had been set free 
by the German retreat. 

Our observations began at Senlis, where the 
traces of invasion, although not recent, were 
still plainly to be seen. The Germans held the 
town for ten days in September, 1914, and 
here began the ruins which were to mark 
their passage ever3rwhere. I watched Mr. 
Hoover as he went quickly through what was 
once the rue de la Republique; we counted as 
many as one hundred and seventeen houses 
which had been burned down as a "punitive 
measure'^ on the 3d and 4th of that September. 
Hoover, as usual, said nothing. He had already 
seen many ruined cities; he knew Louvain, 
Malines, and Aerschot, and had witnessed 
the result of "punitive measures" throughout 
invaded France. For him and his companions 
Senlis was the end of a Via Dolorosa which 
had its beginning at Vise. 

We were able to count the one hundred 
and seventeen houses because their walls were 
still standing, but their only roof was the sky, 
and scraps of its blue were framed by their 
empty windows. The street looked as if it were 
dead and had been buried deep in the earth 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 173 

for hundreds of quiet years, only to have its 
skeleton given back at last to the light of day. 

The look of intelligent pity in Hoover's face 
was like that of a physician who sees in a 
corpse the signs of a plague whose ravages he 
has studied elsewhere. The German troops 
came in by the northern end of the rue de la 
Republique; they were drunk with vainglory, 
shouting hymns, thanking the Old God who 
was giving them the victory, even rolling over 
each other like mad dervishes as they cried 
"Nach Paris!" 

The men and women of Senlis well remem- 
ber those shouts; the German hordes saw 
Paris in a sort of ecstasy, as the dervishes see 
paradise; they had almost reached their goal; 
a few hours more and their grip would be on 
the heart of France. 

And here we can begin to study their "pu- 
nitive measures." A German officer asked the 
mayor of Senlis, Monsieur Odent, whether all 
the French troops had withdrawn from the 
town, and he, in perfectly good faith, knowing 
that his life hung on the truth of his word, 
answered that they were all gone. He could 
not see that a rear-guard of French and Sene- 
galese infantry was still at the southern end 



174 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

of the street, retreating toward Paris. These 
men saw the first German soldiers coming in 
and fired at them. Then the flood-gates of Ger- 
man wrath were opened. All day long the 
town was heavily shelled, as the German offi- 
cers insisted that it was the civil population, 
^'the cifilians," as they pronounced it, who 
had fired; eye-witnesses have still a lively rec- 
ollection of a corpulent German major stand- 
ing upright in his stirrups and swearing at 
them until he was purple in the face. 

The "cifilians" had fired, and almost as if 
by reflex action the major suddenly drew his 
pistol and blew out the brains of an old 
"cifilian" who was standing patiently and 
quietly outside the door of a hospital. The 
officer gave a hoarse cry like that of a wild 
beast when he saw him fall, and on the instant 
his soldiers fired a volley through the hospital 
windows into the ward where the French nuns 
were tending their wounded. That was the 
first prompt "punitive measure." Soon after- 
ward cyclists rolled along the rue de la Repub- 
lique in orderly line, bearing tins of petrol 
and compressed tablets of naphtha, and set 
fire to every house. From one after another 
thick black smoke arose, followed by fierce 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 175 

flames; all night long they mounted into the 
still September air, blotting out the full moon 
and the quiet stars. 

That is how an old street in an old French 
town became a skeleton of stone. Let us exam- 
ine this "punitive measure" calmly and coolly 
— ^let us try to see how and why it all hap- 
pened, for we shall surely come across the 
same system again and again; it is simple — 
the mere alphabet of a method; through it we 
shall learn to love the Creator who made the 
world and to hate the German who has done 
his best to destroy it. 

But the job at Senlis was not quite finished; 
Monsieur Odent, who had staked his life when 
he said the French had left the town, had lost 
and was not yet dead. The forfeit had to be 
paid. He was able to send his wife and chil- 
dren to a place of safety, and he did not be- 
tray any emotion as he and six other hostages 
were led away by a file of German soldiers, to 
be judged under a cluster of oak-trees on the 
edge of a wood, near the village of Saint Cla- 
mant. A cluster of oaks for a judgment-seat, 
like that of Saint Louis ! The mayor was 
obliged to listen to his death-sentence, which 
was long; then he turned toward his friends, 



176 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

the other hostages, saying to one of them: 
"Good-by, my poor Benoit; we shall not 
meet again in this world, for I am to be shot." 
He took out his crucifix and his pocketbook, 
asked that his watch might be given to his 
wife, clasped the trembling outstretched hands 
of his friends, and turned toward the judges 
who awaited him under the cluster of oaks. 
Two soldiers shot him from a distance of ten 
paces, thus carrying on a tragic and glorious 
family tradition, for his father, also mayor of 
Senlis, had been shot by the Prussians in 1870. 

This story was told to us and to our Ameri- 
can companions by one of the six hostages 
who were there on that day. He added : "While 
our friend's body was being thrown into a 
shallow grave before our eyes, we could see 
the light of incendiary fires spreading over 
the night sky." 

An old cure met us in the cathedral, and he 
also had a story to tell. A German officer had 
held a pistol to his head, and shouted that 
he must have the key of the belfry, as there 
were mitrailleuses on the platform of the 
tower. The priest gave up the key and led the 
German to the top of the belfry, where they 
found only the bells, that during hundreds of 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 177 

years had rung for the birth, the prayers, the 
love, and the death of sons and daughters of 
France. 

A week later an armored car came down the 
road from Paris at full speed. Monsieur Odent 
was not there to hear "The German troops 
are falling back!" but his body must have 
thrilled with joy under its thin covering of 
French earth. Scattered shots still rang out 
from the square, but as the car sped back the 
men in it stood up, crying out: "Keep your 
courage up — ^we're coming back V 

It is an old story now, as war-stories go, 
and a simple one. Senlis and Chantilly mark 
the extreme edge of the German invasion. 
Now German prisoners are at work in the 
fields, getting in the first crop of hay under 
the May sunshine; the invasion is checked, 
the hymns of triumph are heard no more, 
and the cry "Nach Paris !" sticks in the 
throat of the German armies. 

From Senlis we went rapidly to Compiegne, 
and our way this morning lay through the 
forest of Ourscamp. Lilies-of-the-valley, stand- 
ing straight between their blade-like leaves, 
made all the air sweet with their fragrance, 
and above their white beauty the great trees. 



178 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

beeches, oaks, and birches, stretched out their 
branches glossy with their new leafage, pro- 
tecting the mysteries of many nests. Suddenly, 
in the heart of the forest, we came upon a sort 
of frontier — ^the line of trenches which shel- 
tered the Germans for two years, and where 
Fate, thought by them to be their servant, 
began to turn against them. 

We went down into their dugouts, empty 
ant-hills with a labyrinth of passages cut deep 
in the earth, all leading to the hiding-place of 
the murderous master-spirit, the German 
officer who worked, ate, drank, and slept, bur- 
rowed deep under our beech-trees. Above 
the door of his sheltered bedroom some one 
had drawn a clock, and under the figures on 
its face these words were carefully written: 

"Im Gleichmas die Stunde in scharfen 
Wacht bis in Frauen Armen uns in Friede 
lacht." ("During our keen vigil one hour is 
like another, until Peace shall smile at us in 
women's arms.") 

"While the world was at peace they only 
thought of war," remarked Hoover, "and 
during the war they dreamt of peace." 

So this is the fatal border-line behind which 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 179 

France suffered and waited. It is a mere line, 
not wider than a ditch or the bed of a brook; 
workmen were busy getting material out of it, 
and rolHng the strands of barbed wire into 
great balls. 

We went fast, for we were expected at 
Noyon — or, rather, to be accurate, Mr. Hoover 
and his companions were expected there, as 
they had just left one side of the invaded dis- 
tricts to see what war had done on the other 
border. We had only time for a glimpse of the 
ruined villages of Carlepont and Cuts, but 
what struck us most, as at Senlis, was the gap- 
ing emptiness of the windows, the unscreened 
daylight streaming in where our eyes had been 
accustomed to see the soft shadow behind 
which lives had a right to privacy. Now noth- 
ing was hidden nor was there any life to hide; 
weeds were already growing in the gaping 
holes of the ruined walls, and we could see the 
gleaming eyeballs of famished cats as they 
prowled about in the piles of rubbish. It was 
still possible to distinguish the way in which 
the little villages had been laid out, and where 
the streets had crossed, but the houses with 
their blank squares, and light streaming in 
where there was no longer any life, made us 



180 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

think of dead bodies whose staring eyes have 
not been closed by pious hands. In these ruins 
there was neither peace nor forgetfulness. 

Ahhough Noyon had only been liberated 
for a few days, everything was quiet, and the 
work of reparation went on busily. Some of our 
soldiers were loading trucks with beams, while 
others were using them to run up a makeshift 
bridge across the Oise. As we passed a camp 
of negro troops we heard their guttural African 
songs, with a very rudimentary accompani- 
ment on the guitar; the men smiled as we ran 
by, and we saw the light flash on their white 
teeth. The old church in the square, its 
arches a little sunken with the weight of cen- 
turies, was happily uninjured; it still sheltered 
the figures of apostles and saints, and seemed 
to shed the blessing of ancient France on the 
national life beginning anew in its shadow. 

I could not help saying to my travelling 
companion, "You are in one of the old centres 
of French history," but our friends from the 
New World did not need to be told, and were 
often more sensitive than we ourselves to the 
subtle influences of our past. They felt the liv- 
ing poetry of old France as we should feel if, 
instead of finding only tombs and empty tem- 
ples on classic ground, we were allowed to 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 181 

know the life, the thoughts, and the manners 
of the beings who once inhabited those won- 
derful lands. Our American friends used even 
to say tome: 

"Why do you draw such a marked and al- 
most hostile line between the present and the 
past? You say *the past' sometimes as if it 
were not a part of the present/When we look 
back across the ages France to us always *is'; 
in the world's history it is the Word." 

"France 'is.'" Those words, spoken by a 
foreigner, touched me deeply, for it is true that 
there are traces of our past through the hours 
of our daily life, as there have been through 
the long hours of war. Noyon ! It was here that 
Charles, not yet Charlemagne, was crowned 
while still only planning his great empire; it 
was here that Hugues was proclaimed rex 
francorum; near here Clovis the Frank con- 
quered Alaric the Visigoth, and just now, as 
we passed Compiegne, we might have seen 
traces of the ditch where Jeanne d'Arc stum- 
bled and was taken prisoner. AH the past is 
indeed present in our lives to-day; the mighti- 
est river that sweeps along is, like the hum- 
blest brook, made up of all the water that has 
been poured into it. 

We were glad, after a solemn fashion, to 



182 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

take possession again of the old streets of 
Noyon, to hear the footfalls of our young offi- 
cers as they went about the business of instal- 
lation, and, above all, to be able to bring there 
a little group of the Americans who had seen 
the invasion and whose hands had dealt out 
the food that kept our people alive. We were 
also excited at the thought that we had taken 
a step, even if only one, into the invaded ter- 
ritory, and we knew that there was still a 
superhuman task to be done before the coun- 
try could really live again. 

An officer showed us the way to the sub- 
prefecture, where Major B. was waiting for 
us. Mr. Hoover went in before us, and I was 
able for the first time to see the singularly 
sweet expression of which his stern and obsti- 
nate face is capable. Major B. said a few 
words to him in a low voice; I saw Hoover 
stop suddenly and almost recoil, as if he were 
surprised by an emotion to be mastered before 
he went any further. He had taken off his hat, 
and his smooth, thick hair made a close frame 
for his stubborn and intelligent head. 

He went forward quickly into the open 
room, where a large and uncommon group of 
men was waiting for us, or, rather, for him. 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 183 

They were all civilians, for the most part old 
peasants of our countryside, and as the oldest 
came toward him holding out both hands as 
if bearing a message from all the rest, Hoover 
understood very well what it meant; his lips 
quivered slightly, and even he, the president 
of imperturbables, could hardly keep back 
the tears which sprang to his eyes. 

These old civilians — ^for there were no young 
men in the invaded country — ^were not stran- 
gers to Rivards and Morton, who had lived 
either with these same men or with others 
just like them. They were the mayors of the 
ninety liberated villages, and when they had 
heard, the day before, that Hoover was com- 
ing, they had all started to meet him, some on 
foot and some in country carts; although the 
roads were still almost impassable, they had 
somehow managed to come. Now that these 
old Frenchmen were once more free, it was 
the wish of their hearts to thank the chair- 
man of the C. R. B. 

And they knew how to do it. We had heard 
the stories of Harder, of Morton, and of Mrs. 
Vernon, but had we really seen ? Had we any 
idea what the collaboration of these Americans 
had really meant, voluntarily imprisoned as 



184 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

they were with our people, working with them 
for months and years to receive and distribute 
that humble thing — daily bread ? 

These men who came from the liberated vil- 
lages knew and remembered; gratitude, affec- 
tion, and confidence shone in their eyes; they 
were like wounded men who, once well again, 
hold out grateful hands to those who have 
carried them to safety, healed their wounds, 
and tended them back to health. One after 
another Hoover, Morton, and Rivards shook 
the hands (some of them very old and gnarled) 
of the mayors and their deputies, and for us, 
who had not witnessed the gradual formation 
of a strong tie, it was very interesting to see 
this cordiality and, so to speak, "family feel- 
ing" between strangers and the old-fashioned 
country people of our old land. 

"Now confess," said Morton to one of them, 
laughing, "that when you first heard that 'the 
Americans' were coming you expected to see 
us wearing beads around our necks and 
feathers on our heads." 

"Oh," answered the old man, "it was the 
women who did not know any better." 

At last the time had come when every one 
might relax, and they began to exchange recol- 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 185 

lections as to rice, bacon, peas, beans, and the 
little bills of the paper currency. One of the 
Frenchmen summed it all up by saying: 

"The American bread was as if it had been 
French,^* and another added: "And if we 
hadn't had it there would have been nothing 
of us left but our bones; the Americans were 
like Providence, which doesn't desert the 
house of misfortune." 

" But France gave the money for the bread," 
said Morton. 

"I know," said the old man; "but without 
you the money would not have turned into 
bread." 

They were all familiar with the complicated 
organization of the food supply, and the old 
Frenchmen and young Americans talked about 
business matters, and told stories which both 
sides understood without any explanation, as 
people do who belong to the same family. It 
would not have taken much to make us new- 
comers in the liberated regions feel like out- 
siders, French though we were. They spoke of 
their last accounts, of what had happened to 
the last sacks of flour and the last tins of food. 
"Above all, be careful not to let the Germans 
get any tin — ^not so much as the lid of a sar- 



186 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

dine-box," was the order. It was understood, 
and every precaution taken, up to the last 
minute. "They wouldn't have found that !" 
was followed by the familiar gesture of the 
thumb-nail against the teeth. 

Then their thoughts went to those who were 
absent. If the mayors were almost all old and 
"near the earth," as we say, it is because when 
the Germans were obliged to fall back they 
took with them their prey from many villages, 
in the shape of the younger men and those of 
most importance, whose chateaux or factories 
were in the neighborhood. The mayors of Fol- 
embray and Candor had been carried off as 
hostages; the day of deliverance had dawned, 
but they had been swept off by German offi- 
cers in the retreat. The mayor of OgnoUes, 
who had been taken as a hostage in 1914, had 
been repatriated, after two years — and he told 
us what the German prison-camps were like. 

We lunched quickly, as is fitting in time of 
war, and just as we were about to leave, the 
oldest of the Frenchmen rose to his feet, his 
sunburnt hand holding a glassful of the gen- 
erous red wine of France. His bushy eyebrows 
stood out like white thickets over his eyes, 
which, although faded with age, were still 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 187 

bright — ^the eyes of one who sees more than 
he dreams; his broad face bore the mark of 
privations, and Hfe had wrinkled it with deep 
furrows, Uke those of his own fields, for the 
peasant grows to resemble the land he loves. 
His thin lips were parted in a smile which had 
once been merry, and as he stood up we saw 
that he stooped a little and that his thin 
shoulders drooped under the folds of a velvet- 
een coat which had evidently been made for 
a larger frame. He looked Hoover straight in 
the eyes and thanked him in the name of all 
the others and in the name of the liberated 
villages. His words were few, for when one has 
suffered much, one loses the power of speech, 
and the golden tongue of France is not yet 
unloosed. The sinews of his thin neck swelled 
with emotion as the old man recalled the long 
days of trial, and gave the names of some who 
should have been there . . . but had been laid 
low by German bullets. Then with the same 
gesture that Mrs. Vernon had made the other 
evening, he took up a morsel of bread rever- 
ently in his fingers, as if it had been blessed, 
and said in a voice that broke a little : 

"This is the bread of France, and thanks 
to you American gentlemen our sweat has 



188 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

never moistened the bread of slavery; we and 
our wives and our children have eaten the 
bread of France/' 

Hoover answered him very briefly; it was a 
fine sight to see the peasant from the Ile-de- 
France .and the great citizen of the United 
States speaking to each other, almost with 
religious solemnity, each looking full in the 
other's face, as one equal looks at another. 

"We have left invaded France, because we 
are coming to fight for the France that is 
free," was the substance of what Hoover said. 
The time is past when America gave only 
her wheat; now American hearts, American 
wills, and American lives are offering them- 
selves and coming to us in their legions. 

Hoover, as he spoke to this son of our soil, 
seemed to be pledging America to the relief of 
our invaded and tortured country, and we all 
rose instinctively, as men did in the old days 
when they broke Easter bread together. 

We thought of all the prodigious work 
undertaken on the other side of the Atlantic. 
While we stood here on the border of the 
region just set free from invasion, over there 
young men who have never trodden the soil 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 189 

French meadows, were crowding into the re- 
cruiting offices, signing their names in regis- 
ters, binding themselves to us for Hfe and 
death. I remembered our doubts only a few 
weeks ago, when we said: *'Is it possible that 
an army can spring in a day, like helmeted 
Minerva, from the brain of Wilson ?" 

The impossible had come to pass, the great 
crusade had begun, and from one side of the 
Atlantic to the other messages were flying to 
and fro like passionate outbreathings — ^mes- 
sages of hope, of battle, of life, and of death. 

Hoover left us in a hurry, to run through 
the liberated villages which he wished to see. 
We went after him to the same villages, which 
are indeed liberated, but only as prisoners are 
whom the enemy has mutilated before he was 
forced to give them up. 

Love, pity, reparation — ^those are the words 
which spring from the depths of the heart 
after seeing what we have seen. 

* * 

How shall I write ? What I shall say will be 



190 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

like words spoken at the tombs of the beloved 
dead — it will be hard to stop. 

* * 

Let us smell the almost imperceptible fra- 
grance of a branch of green leaves, or the per- 
fume of this bunch from the lilac-bushes which 
grow triumphantly beside the ruins; let us 
look at the trees cut off near the ground, los- 
ing the life-blood of their sap, and lying like 
dead things along the roads. Nature rejoices, 
birds are singing, and larks shower down from 
the sky their tribute to the joy of living. 

But the earth mourns; the delicate grace of 
the flowers which bloom among the desolation 
moves us like the innocent smile of a baby 
found alone by the cold hearth of a house 
where his father and mother have been put 
to death or torn away. 

This bunch of flowers was picked at Mar- 
gnies, as we and our friends followed the road 
from Noyon. They knew it better than we, and 
Morton drove the car. It was four o'clock in 
the afternoon, and as soon as we left Noyon 
we began to pass the first rows of trees cut 
down beside the roads. When we reached 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 191 

Margnies-les-Cerises (such a pretty name !) 
we thought we had come into a place given 
over to death. The tiny houses, all crumbled 
into little bits, made us think of a city of ants 
on which some powerful and ill-natured beast 
had set his crushing foot. 

We had sounded our horn from time to 
time in the dead silence of the countryside, 
and as we did so again in the village two old 
men came out of a deep hole in the earth be- 
side the church, close to the graveyard. They 
looked at us quietly, with faces used to adver- 
sity; mildly astonished to hear and see us, 
they seemed to be inquiring what we wanted, 
as they might have done when the village was 
prosperous, and tourists came there to buy 
cherries, on the strength of its name. 

They saw our eyes fixed on a sort of gibbet 
which reared itself, like another deity, in front 
of the church; it was made of two smooth 
newly felled tree-trunks, with the bark taken 
off, connected by a stout truss reinforced by 
iron bands. 

A third huge trunk hung loosely by a chain 
from this truss, so that when pushed it would 
deliver a shattering blow to the frail w^alls of 
the village houses. 



192 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

"That was their battering-ram/' said one 
of the two ghosts. Yes, they had revived the 
battering-ram of antiquity; it did not tap at 
doors furtively and discreetly, like death, but 
struck with heavy and repeated blows, goring 
our houses like a mighty bull. A sinister and 
silent job ! There were no flames to show 
against the night sky, no twisting smoke to 
rise in daytime, and the dull sound of the 
blows was lost before it reached our lines. It 
was as if living bodies had been kicked to 
death; the houses fell in little bits which were 
scattered over the ground. 

The two old men told us their names — I can 
only remember that their Christian names 
were Eustache and Julien. It appeared that 
they were not alone; from other holes other 
ghosts suddenly came to life; some even 
showed their heads, like spectres, through the 
opening of a shattered tombstone, for the 
Germans had disturbed the last sleep of the 
dead by breaking open their graves in order 
to take shelter in them as though they had 
been ditches. 

The spectres came up to us, all of them old, 
with incredibly dilapidated clothes. They were 
looking in these "ditches," they explained, for 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 193 

what had been left there; odds and ends of 
furniture taken from the village, mattresses, 
bedding; stuff with which the German crows 
had made their nests in our graves. With these 
remnants our old people meant to make them- 
selves beds, in some corner less funereal and 
less profaned. 

The churchyard wall was furrowed and 
pierced by shell-fire; we sat down on part of 
it, and Eustache and Julien stood before us, 
smoking their pipes with an air of satisfaction. 
The soldiers, they said, had given them to- 
bacco. 

Their hollow faces showed the hardships 
they had undergone, but their eyes were clear 
and steady, and the light of a smile came into 
them as our American friends held out their 
hands. As Morton well knew, a French peas- 
ant rarely smiles suddenly and amiably at a 
foreigner; one would have said here, as at 
Noyon, that it was a meeting of old friends. 
Those two years and a half were equal to a 
lifetime of suffering spent together. 

"The American gentlemen will find changes 
here," said Eustache laconically, spitting ener- 
getically on one side, and shaking his old head 
in the direction of the battering-ram. 



194 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Those few words were enough. We stared 
together at the creature, a daughter of Ash- 
taroth, a diaboHcal invention, the ram; and 
we understood it all; the ram had battered at 
all the doors; as the Germans could not take 
the little French village as a hostage, they had 
murdered it. 

The pipes were finished, and the last whiffs 
of their smoke exhaled, almost in silence; a 
few laborers, scattered here and there in what 
they still called the fields, came to join us. 
There were twenty-three of them, all old in- 
habitants of Margnies, still sheltering them- 
selves underground at night, and in daytime 
trying to recover their belongings from the 
ditches, or occupied outside the village in try- 
ing to cultivate their little market-gardens. 

This is what old Eustache told us of the 
last days of the village, a few words at a time, 
and shaking his pipe more often than I could 
count. 

"On the 6th of February, two months ago, 
we had not known for two years about any- 
thing that was going on outside our village. 
Every morning the Germans used to stick 
their orders up at the Kommandatur" (the 
German word sounded oddly in a French 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 195 

mouth). "That morning they warned us that 
at four o'clock in the afternoon they would 
take away the 'able-bodied men' still left 
among us; there were not many, for we had 
already seen deportations; there were just 
half a dozen, and their names were posted up. 

"At four o'clock the six men went off be- 
tween ten soldiers, carrying their clothes in a 
bundle on their backs; they were much upset 
because they could not get any decent shoes, 
and we did not know where they were going; 
they went off toward the north, on the road 
which goes uphill behind the church. 

"The next day there was another notice on 
the door of the Kommandatur. 

"This time it was an order to all the women 
of Margnies between the ages of seventeen 
and sixty years, who had not children under 
fifteen, to be at the open doors of their houses 
at four o'clock that day, also ready to go 
away. 

"They were ordered to take with them a 
parcel with a change of shoes and a blanket — 
no other baggage. 

"It was the first time that any of our 
women had been deported, and as we did not 
know what had been going on anywhere else. 



196 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

it was a blow. In a farming country like this, 
where every one works in the fields, the 
women's help had been needed. In winter they 
were employed to break the ice which was 
put in the cellars, in spring to nip the extra 
buds off the fruit-trees, and in summer to pick 
the cherries and help with the harvest. 

"We were always working under orders, 
and not for ourselves, but in a certain way we 
got the good of our work, because the Ameri- 
can gentlemen had made arrangements so that 
we had our potatoes, and we were paid for 
our crops in bread. 

"So it was the first time women were taken 
away from us; that was kept for the last day. 
Nothing was to be left behind but old crea- 
tures like us, and rubbish. We did not know 
that it was the last day of the occupation. 

"Look there," said the old man, and he 
pointed to the other side of the graveyard, 
where a heap of stones was half sheltered by 
a dislocated roof whose broken tiles hung down 
like red autumn leaves on a trellis — "that was 
my house, and that long stone was the thresh- 
old; I put it back into place. 

"On that stone my daughter and my daugh- 
ter's daughter stood in the doorway, waiting 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 197 

for it to be four o'clock. We could not speak; 
in the room behind us the clock was ticking 
off the seconds, and that made our hearts beat. 
We were waiting for the church-clock to strike 
four. I am a widower and my daughter is 
forty-four years old; her husband had been 
taken away the day before; my granddaughter 
is twenty-five years old. Twenty-six women 
were taken away as if they had been cattle 
bought at the market. They went off by that 
road; our trees were still standing then, and 
only the day before the women had been busy 
nipping off cherry-buds. 

''The officer who had charge of the job was 
a young lieutenant; he did not like to look us 
in the face, and kept whistling one of their 
tunes, and flicking his boots with his riding- 
whip. 

"I was the oldest man, and I asked him if 
he would allow me to load a donkey with 
some bundles of clothes, some more blankets, 
and shoes. 

"He grunted out that it was 'verboten,' 
and hit harder at his boots. 

"So they went away like thieves, between 
German soldiers with fixed bayonets. I can't 
tell you how we felt." 



198 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Old Eustache took out his pipe, looked at 
his companions, spat upon the ground, and 
was silent. 

In a moment he went on: 

"Then we men went into the fields. From 
a corner of my cherry-orchard there was a 
good view of the turn in the road, and some 
of my friends who are here now will remem- 
ber" — and he looked at his companions — 
"that they joined me there. We said to each 
other: *We shall see them once more, at the 
turn of the road, although the daylight is 
failing.' We stood there watching for them, 
but not close together, because we were for- 
bidden to stand in groups, and all at once we 
thought we must be dreaming, for we heard 
them singing. They were far away already, and 
it sounded sweetly, like chanting in church. 

"Do you know what our women were sing- 
ing, with the German bayonets all around 
them? The ^ Marseillaise^ !^^ The old man 
laughed, showing his yellow teeth, where the 
pipe had made a gap. He laughed for sheer 
pride and satisfaction, as parents do when 
they tell you some exploit of their children 
which they think very clever. And he summed 
up his impressions by saying: "They certainly 
went off bravely," 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 199 

After a pause he went on: 

"But that wasn't all. That same evening 
another notice was stuck up, ordering us to 
make bundles of all the clothes and linen 
which we still had, and to take them to the 
church. It was a queer order, but for two 
years and a half hardly a day had passed 
without a placard telling us to do or not to do 
something. 

"This order made it easier for them; if we 
took all our clothes to the church, they 
wouldn't have the trouble of going to our 
houses for them. Then came still another 
order; it was our turn to go, all of us; the vil- 
lage was to be cleared out, and we were to 
load a donkey with all the food we had on 
hand. You know we received our supplies from 
the American committee every fortnight; 
those who had any money paid, and those who 
were too poor were given vouchers by the vil- 
lage, so they were not left out. Every one got 
something, and when the order came to go, 
we had provisions for a week ahead. They 
took us to a farm ten kilometres away and left 
us there; there were sixty-six of us, counting 
the children. We heard the noise of firing, and 
knew the French must be coming and the 
Germans clearing out. As the French and 



200 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

German shells went about their business they 
crossed over our heads. We were between the 
two firing-lines. We lived on the food we had 
brought with us, but we couldn't tell how long 
we might be there, and we began to count the 
grains of coffee and rice. We slept, if we could 
get any sleep, all crowded together on some 
straw in a barn. One night we heard a shell — 
it was a French one — coming through the air 
with a noise like a locomotive; it fell on a 
woman who was lying there, and crushed both 
her legs. We had no linen, nothing to help her 
with, but the women had washed their che- 
mises at the fountain, and they tore them up 
to make bandages. The woman couldn't help 
crying out, and her old man, who was next her, 
said: 'Don't scream so loud, or else the others 
may be afraid.' 

"The eighth day was a Thursday, and we 
were as if we had been on a raft after a storm. 
The rice was used up and we had no more 
bread, but we knew the French were coming 
nearer. By noon they were so close that we 
could see their uniforms, but we didn't know 
what all that light blue meant, and we didn't 
recognize their helmets. We hadn't any French 
flag, so we tied a white cloth to the end of a 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 201 

pole, and then we saw one soldier, and then 
two and then three, running toward us, run- 
ning fast, because the Germans behind us were 
still firing. Sometimes we thought we saw our 
men fall, but it was only because they would 
drop into a hole to take shelter for a minute, 
and then their helmets and heads would show 
again as they went on. 

"We went on waving our pole, and they 
knew what we meant. Then you said, Julien " 
— and he looked at the other old man — 
"'Why don't we do as the women did, and 
sing the ''Marseillaise^' ?^ We were like mad- 
men, but the little soldier who was running 
toward us understood, and he waved his rifle 
at us. When he and his two comrades got to 
where we were they were all out of breath. 
The women were heating them some coffee 
when another French shell struck quite close 
to the farm. Then the first soldier started up 
— ^he was a sharpshooter; I wish you had seen 
him — and he cried out, 'This won't do!' and 
he ran back again under fire, calling out to 
the men who were coming on : 'They're French 
people here! Stop firing!' In about an hour 
the troops came up and we were free. I tell you 
I think we were all out of our heads. And then 



202 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

we wanted to go back to the village; we had 
seen from the farm that there had been neither 
smoke nor flames over it, so we knew it had 
not been set on fire, and we were glad. We got 
back on a Friday, sixty-five of us, for the 
woman whose legs had been crushed was dead. 
This is what we found" — and he pointed to 
the ruins. "The battering-ram was here, as it 
is to-day; it's a sort of curiosity. And all our 
trees were cut down, as you see them now. 
There was not a single roof left; we sent the 
women and children to Noyon, and we men 
have stayed on, getting things together as far 
as we can, and the army feeds us. You may go 
wherever you like in this part of the country, 
you will find the same story everywhere." 

The old man had spoken without any heat, 
and now he was silent again, as if his thoughts 
were in the past. 

Around us, along the road, in the orchards, 
even in the graveyard were the cherry-trees, 
all cut down, all fallen the same way, showing 
their fresh white wounds, and all crowned 
with their white blossoms in honor of Spring. 
The sap had risen in them before they were 
murdered, filling the branches, pushing out the 
buds, only to crown the dead. All that was 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 203 

most precious and most alive in spring was in 
a fragrant foam of white and pink, flowering 
for the last time above the ruins and beside 
the open graves. 

We had often before seen orchards in May 
ravaged by hail or tempest; we had lamented 
that so much beauty and promise should 
strew the ground, and had felt as if the drip- 
ping and denuded branches must be weeping 
for what they had lost, but that was nothing 
compared to seeing these trees lying on the 
ground, hacked to death, and yet still wearing 
their lavish beauty. It was almost as if one 
should see a smile on the face of a child whose 
head has been severed from its body. 

"One would never have thought of that,'* 
said the old man with a twisted smile, which 
drew his lips until they showed the gap in his 
teeth. With his foot, shod with a dilapidated 
boot, he gently touched a branch where the 
buds were still rolled into little pink balls 
under the shining lacquer of their encasing 
leaves. The air was full of a smell like honey, 
and some of the groups of blossoms hung down 
into the desecrated graves. Death was all 
death no longer, nor was life really life. These 
three-and-twenty men had been shipwrecked 



204 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

upon deep waters of misfortune; the profes- 
sors in the science of devastation had known 
just how to lift the flood-gates. 

All around the churchyard walls were rows 
of wooden crosses, and these had been re- 
spected. There were so many more than the 
enclosure could hold that they had overflowed 
through a gap in the low vv^all, and spread out 
toward the open fields. Old cities have been 
obliged to submit to breaches in their encir- 
cling walls in order that modern life may flow 
out into their suburbs, but here it was not the 
living which needed more room, but the dead. 
All these graves were of men who fell in 1914; 
we may have seen them as they went off sing- 
ing in the crowded trains that followed one 
another as closely as flower-decked carts in 
autumn, laden with grapes for the wine-press. 
The crosses were surmounted by kepis, once 
red but now faded and discolored by sun and 
rain; the bodies of their wearers were picked 
up in the neighboring roads and fields, where 
their red caps and trousers had made them 
conspicuous targets. 

The association of the "Souvenir Frangais" 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 205 

had already placed its emblem in the centre of 
each cross, and in a line with it new rosettes 
of the sacred colors shone like marks of honor. 
The arms of the crosses touch at their ends; 
they kept orderly ranks, like unflinching 
soldiers. 

O graves of our fighting men, O wooden 
cross, crux lignis, when our hands touch you 
in these liberated villages, when we shall em- 
brace you later in the France not yet set free, 
what other word can come to our lips but that 
by which we hail the cross of the Saviour: 

Crux Ave . . . Spes unica. 

Worship — ^that is to say, love and prayer, 
the spontaneous impulse to give our puny 
selves to France — ^is what alone will preserve 
us from the vanity of words and the weakness 
of tears. 

Crux Ave . . . Spes unica. 

Have we then set our hopes on the dead ? 
Yes, for some of our dead are more alive than 
men who still breathe. "He who loseth his life 
shall save it" were the words of our Lord. 

The Old Testament comes down to us from 
men of times long gone, but these new men 
who lie here have also left us a testament, 
which is a symbol. 



206 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Crux lignis, humble and magnificent cross, 
cut from the wood of our forest-trees, we shall 
see thee on the days when we commemorate 
the Passion, and the priest lifts as far as his 
arm can reach the symbol of our redemption 
— ^the Cross. We shall see the body and the 
blood of our dead, as we loved them while 
they were living and our own, each time when, 
in the Canon of the mass, the sacred offering 
of the Host is renewed, held high in silence 
above our bowed heads. 



The old man was right; the story was the 
same as we drove about the country; one scene 
of devastation followed another. We met 
hardly any living men, but here and there on 
the edge of the road, or by itself in a field, we 
saw a spot of color like a fading poppy, the 
red kepi and the cross that marked a grave. 

First it was Candor, then Champieu, where 
we found by actual count that nine ghosts had 
come back. Ognolles, Beaulieu, les Fontaines 
(a market-town); these were the last villages 
invaded, and the first set free; all this border 
was swept by gun-fire, and only given back to 
us because another line was formed in the rear 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 207 

— ^for the France already freed is only a part 
of the France still invaded. The highway was 
red, because it was mended with tiles torn 
from the roofs of houses, and all the roads 
were marked by prostrate trees. Here, in this 
orchard, a cure was shot, as the Germans 
charged that he had communicated with our 
men by means of machinery hidden in his 
cellar. Our priests everj^^where were accused 
of a sort of magic; they were said to give our 
soldiers warning by signs from their church- 
towers, or through their church-bells, or else 
underground, from their cellars. 

A newly made grave at the corner of a 
house bore this inscription: **To my dear 
papa, shot by cowards," and another, not far 
off: "To my son, shot in his mother's house." 
We were also shown the four stone steps where 
a child stood at his father's door, shaking his 
fist at his new masters as they marched into 
the village, and pretending to throw stones 
at them. On that very spot, outside the house 
where he was born, on the door-step where as 
a schoolboy he had played marbles only a 
month before, the men in gray caps tied him 
to the little iron railing; the marks of the 
bullets that killed him may be seen on the 



208 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

wall. I remember seeing in Lorraine, two 
months ago, the bullet-marks on a wall where 
some women who had taken refuge in a cellar 
were dragged out and shot. 

The little boy's grave was all covered with 
lilies-of-the-valley, as pure as the little vic- 
tim's soul. While they held the village the 
Germans tried to conceal it, even set a watch 
over it, but every one knew where it was, 
and now it has been remade and lovingly 
planted with white flowers, to be held in ever- 
lasting remembrance. 

But all the invaders have not left the vil- 
lage; here are the pompous graves of German 
soldiers, their marble headstones covered with 
grandiloquent inscriptions. ^'Tapferer UeW^ 
(brave hero) is the most frequent term, and 
one that would never be found even on the 
most illustrious grave in France. " Tapferer 
HeW^ is the language of Walhalla. How much 
finer by comparison are our simple and truth- 
ful words " Killed in battle " ! 

In the cemeteries the French and German 
graves stand facing each other in close lines, 
as if still ready for the fight. I heard the foot- 
steps of Morton and Rivards behind me; they 
stood a little apart, each absorbed in his own 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 209 

thoughts; it was easy to see that these graves 
of French soldiers were full of meaning for 
the Americans, who had just come into the 
war. They both sat down on the trunk of a 
tree, evidently somewhat depressed, although 
the air was soft and balmy; their minds were 
following the same train of thought as our 
own. 

"The day will soon come," said Morton, 
simply and gravely, "when we also shall make 
pilgrimages to the French cemeteries to visit 
the graves of our dead — of our men who are 
not yet even soldiers, who have grown to 
manhood without having ever dreamt of 
war," and he murmured in a low voice, as if 
speaking to himself: "They will be in a field 
like this, a French field, and it may be that 
their crosses will be made from one of these 
apple-trees which have been cut down ... it 
is very extraordinary." 

"Yes," said Rivards, "it is extraordinary, 
but also logical. The war provoked by Ger- 
many is an aggression against our ideals. She 
would grind the nations to powder, as she has 
ground these villages. Her aggressiveness is 
the most extraordinary thing of all; in the 
present state of our civilization we had never 



210 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

imagined that a whole people would deliber- 
ately and willingly turn back to barbarism. 
... It is only logical that we should rise against 
her, and that one result should be that we 
shall lie here, side by side with you, because 
we have all fallen in defense of our common 
faith." 

"Do you remember," said Morton, "the 
political doctrine which used to be taught in 
our universities ? It was that of Washington 
and Jefferson. We were enjoined to stand aloof 
from the old quarrels which have burdened 
past centuries, making a turmoil the echoes of 
which still resound through European coun- 
tries. We were exempt, so to speak, from the 
original sin of nations — ^war which breeds war. 
We were born spotless; there was no ignorant 
barbarism in the background of our history, 
no debt of blood to be paid, no age-long retal- 
iation to be carried out; our New World had 
never known childhood; it was the result of 
deep and deliberate study on the part of those 
who constructed it; they desired that it 
should be as near perfection as was possible, 
and, above all, that it should stand always 
for the right. We were taught to feel the 
moral beauty of a peace which should allow 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 211 

each man and each group of men a full share 
of liberty, and this during a period when 
Germany was inculcating the moral beauty 
of war, because through it came strength able 
to master the world. Those diametrically op- 
posed principles each developed immense and 
contradictory forces; it was inevitable that 
they should sooner or later come into violent 
conflict. We had believed that we could escape 
war, as the alchemists of former times, de- 
voted to the discovery of the philosopher's 
stone, believed that if they found it they 
could escape death. But if those who deliber- 
ately resolve on war refuse the benefits of 
peace, those who are deliberately resolved to 
have peace do not refuse their share of the 
suffering induced by war. We are faithful to 
our own souls and to our worship of liberty 
when we take up arms against the Germans 
who are endeavoring, in the name of their in- 
sensate pride and their former barbarities, to 
exterminate what has been slowly created 
during the centuries by the higher thought 
and by brotherly love. The spirit of Wash- 
ington will lead our first armies overseas. 

"I agree with what you say as to the Ger- 
mans invoking their former barbarities," said 



212 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Morton. "They are Intolerably ostentatious 
in dragging out of limbo spectres which were 
the horror of the ancient world. History for 
them is nothing but a series of reprisals. 

"Do you remember, Rivards, how often 
they acknowledged this ? How many times 
they spoke of the Thirty Years' War, which, 
according to them, had made their country a 
desert ? But it was they themselves who, like 
quarrelsome ants from neighboring ant-hills, 
had devoured each other without mercy, and 
when France took any part it was for Ger- 
many against Gustavus Adolphus. The Thirty 
Years' War is only a word to conjure with. It 
was the German mercenary bands who could 
be bought and sold in any market who pil- 
laged, killed, burned, and laid waste. The 
Thirty Years' War was really a great civil 
conflict, but that they prefer to ignore. I re- 
member very well a great hulking German 
officer, whose red face was seamed all over 
with rapier scars; we were dining together at 
Charleroi after going our rounds in a district 
where all the French factories had been gutted 
of their machinery. We had seen their whole 
equipment on its way to Germany in heavily 
laden trains. We were discussing this, when 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 213 

suddenly he looked full at me and said, with 
such vehemence that the scars on his face 
turned purple: 'You don't know what Ger- 
many suffered while you were singing your 
Puritan hymns beside your new rivers and 
elaborating your ideal constitutions/ I can 
see him still, as he repeated a grim saying of 
the Kaiser's, while he passed his big hand 
rapidly over the wood of the table, 'We will 
give you back invaded France, but not until 
we have razed it to the ground,' and again 
his hand made the gesture of a mower mak- 
ing a clean sweep with his scythe. 

"Then, going back to our eternal argument, 
he added: 'Look here, Morton, we are not 
any crueller toward France in taking from 
her what we need than you were toward Ger- 
many in sending munitions to France and 
England. We must all live, my dear fellow, 
and we Germans have not always been able 
to live as we should have done. We need new 
machinery for our new factories, we need 
able-bodied men and also women and young 
girls; we are short of hands as well as of 
machines. Germany is a god, and gods must 
have sacrifices.' And I recollect the singular 
tone in which he added: 'You Americans are 



214 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

not human; you were not born in the ordinary 
way; you are the children of a constitution/ 
He laughed as he emptied his glass, and the 
veins stood out on his temples. 'As for war, 
it was not taught us at school, nor in the uni- 
versities, nor even the barracks — ^we learned it 
in our mother's womb.'" 

Morton stopped speaking. The day was 
drawing to its close. We all looked silently at 
the ruins, and thought of the "able-bodied 
men'^ and of the women and young girls who, 
on the very eve of their deliverance from their 
long agony, had been forced to set their faces 
toward Germany as prisoners. The cattle and 
the carts they once drew had all disappeared; 
ploughs and scythes, broken beyond mend- 
ing, lay among the rubbish, and in front of 
the church the battering-ram, with its iron 
tusks, reared its gibbet-like shape. Over the 
broken-down wall we saw the heads of some 
horses; they shook their manes and looked at 
us with their ignorant bright eyes. Their coats 
shone with metallic reflections in the waning 
sunshine; they were annoyed by the flies 
buzzing around them, and we could hear the 
ring of their shod hoofs as they stamped on 
the stones. Their halters were fastened to 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 215 

the branches of the felled trees; two children 
were playing near them, and the golden sun- 
light fell on their hair and eyes; bees were 
busily humming among the flowering 
branches, alighting, taking their tribute of 
pollen, and flying off triumphantly with their 
booty, while on the cross-bar of the gibbet a 
robin sang his heart out to his mate. 

* 
* * 

In order to take our motor-car again we 
had to go the whole length of the village 
street, and it seemed strange to find human 
beings among such indescribable destruction. 
For there were both old men and old women 
at work, especially old men; I could hear the 
sharp tapping of their hammers. These ghosts 
did not seem to be any longer particularly 
astonished; they had acquired the calm indif- 
ference which nature displays before her 
greatest disasters, and, like her, they had 
begun to repair the damage done. One of them 
had collected a lot of unbroken tiles, with 
which he was putting a roof on a shed, and 
he said his old wife would be able to come 
from Noyon the next day, as he had a shelter 
for her. He picked up his tiles, selected and 



216 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

placed them, stooping and standing upright 
again with the regularity of a pulse that can 
only be stopped by death. Another was plan- 
ing boards at an improvised carpenter's bench; 
the yellow shavings hissed and curled as he 
made a door for the gaping blank above his 
threshold. It was death, and yet already the 
renascence; although the little gardens were 
in disorder, and held great bristling balls of 
barbed wire, left behind by the invaders, 
branches of foliage were set out in regular 
rows, and in their shelter tufts of peas and 
beans were coming up, twisting around their 
poles, and holding up the rings of their first 
tendrils toward the sunlight. 

We went into one of these makeshift lodg- 
ings, where everything, doors and their fast- 
enings, roofs and window-casings, had had 
to be made out of whatever came to hand. An 
old woman was lying on a mattress on the 
ground; the German soldiers billeted in her 
house had made her get out of her bed and 
had taken it with them, together with her 
wardrobe, her crockery, her linen — even down 
to her chests and stools — ^nothing was left of 
all her humble and dear belongings. A pho- 
tograph of what had been the family was still 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 217 

hanging on the wall, a fine group of country 
people. The old woman's skinny finger pointed 
out its different members: "My son — he was 
taken off as a hostage; my son" — again — "he 
died during the occupation; my daughter-in- 
law — deported with her two girls"; and the 
shaking finger touched the hkeness of two 
young faces, scarcely to be told apart, with 
braided hair above their girlish brows — and 
then the old hand pointed through the 
broken window-frame to show the road by 
which they had disappeared. 

* 
* * 

We dined that evening with our friends in 
an underground shelter dug by the Germans 
in what had been the park of a French cha- 
teau. There was nothing left now but a 
tangled disorder of felled and mutilated trees, 
and all that remained of the chateau was a 
few side-walls and a heap of rubbish. When 
the men who had lived in it for two years 
were obliged to leave, they mined it and blew 
it up. 

Before we arrived the soft spring night was 
closing in, and a storm was coming. Heavy 
purple and reddish clouds were piled up, and 



218 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

then over them was drawn a dark mist; a 
sHght shower ran across the sky, bent low 
above the earth. When the shower had passed, 
the spaces of the air opened again, and the 
fantastic architecture of the clouds moved in 
golden glory over the desolate and silent land. 
The earth was humble with the humility of 
death; the heavenly purple refulgence fell only 
on devastation. 

As we went along the road, which was red- 
dish where the holes and ruts had been filled 
in with crushed bricks, we met a column of 
troops. We heard their marching-song before 
we saw them, for the wind carried their voices 
across the silent fields. Suddenly the head of 
the column swung round a turn in the road, 
and our eyes were dazzled by the slanting 
rays of the setting sun striking on their hel- 
mets. The first impression was strangely as if 
all the blue of French horizons had been 
made into men, and was pouring itself be- 
tween the divine glow of the heavens and the 
dingy red of the earth. 

It was only a momentary vision, and the 
men had passed by. The land was humiliated, 
but they, its soldiers, were proud and cheer- 
ful as they sang, each with field-flowers stuck 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 219 

in his rifle, for the Germans, who had sowed 
and tilled our fields, could not carry away 
our clover and sainfoin. 

The men passed by; all of the same age, 
their bright eyes somewhat sunken, and the 
same war-hardened expression on every young 
face; their packs weighed heavily on their 
shoulders, but their step was firm and elastic. 
We held out cigarettes, or, rather, threw 
them, for the men were marching so fast 
that they could hardly catch anything, nor 
could they break step, as the imperious 
rhythm of the bugles led them on. 

"" Where are you going?" we cried. They 
answered by pointing vaguely toward the 
west, in the direction of the border of a little 
wood. Their task here was done; this part of 
France was again free; they were going on- 
ward to the new frontier of invaded France. 
The crimson glow in the heavens chased the 
clouds from over their heads, and seemed to 
follow them. The blue wave went on; the earth 
still vibrated to the regular cadence of their 
march, and the air to that of their song — and 
then silence fell again; the gold and crimson 
faded over the fields, and the column melted 
into the grayish blue of the horizon. 



220 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

A few women, standing on their desolate 
thresholds, looked dreamily after the blue 
files as they grew smaller and smaller, and 
then turned back quietly into their nonde- 
script shelters. The gray of the evening cov- 
ered the destruction as if with ashes, and the 
ruined houses were as empty shells tossed 
upon a beach by a careless wave. 

As we hurried toward our h Iting-place we 
said to Morton : 

"We have seen the old god. It is the crea- 
ture in the village square before the church, 
the gibbet, the battering-ram, with its iron 
tusks, to tear open and beat down peaceful 
French homes. And then just afterward we 
have seen what Mrs. Vernon spoke of the 
other evening — ^the young god as he passed 

by." 

* * 

It was almost dark by the time we reached 
B. I did not recognize the place; the very 
look of France is changed — ^I mean where it 
has been invaded by the Germans. Land- 
marks have disappeared, and the horizon line 
is not the same. I knew that the chateau had 
been destroyed, and yet I was amazed to see 
only vacant space where I had known it 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 221 

'I ' — 

standing four-square on its solid foundations. 
I liad expected to see what we call ruins — 
empty arches framing only the familiar land- 
scape, the thicket of birches, the stream flow- 
ing under banks bright with Bengal roses, 
the smiling meadows where the cows lay 
ruminating in lazy quiet. And to the right 
there used to be the factory, with its big 
chimneys never tired of vomiting out their 
black spirals. . . . 

I recognized only the curve of the stream, 
running drearily between its torn and de- 
nuded banks. An old keeper and his wife had 
remained during the invasion, and I walked 
about among the piles of rubbish with them. 
He told me that just before the Germans fell 
back, one morning when he and his wife were 
silently rejoicing within themselves because 
the enemy was preparing to go and leave the 
place empty, they saw the old house seem to 
start up for an instant, and then fall back 
upon itself. Dull subterranean rumblings went 
with this phenomenon, and when at last the 
thick clouds of acrid smoke which hung for 
a long time about the spot had cleared away, 
they could only see the empty space which 
had bewildered me. 



222 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

Here, as everywhere else, it is the monotony 
of these occurrences which makes them so 
terrible; able-bodied men, women, and young 
girls were carried away with the cattle and the 
machines. Human beings and inanimate things 
were equally prey, and went together to make 
up the booty. Under the tall and fragrant 
lime-trees is the wrought-iron gate, of old 
French workmanship, where our friend Count 
B., the master of the chateau, stood to wel- 
come us in those days of a former life that we 
used to call peace. He stayed in his house, al- 
though it was occupied by the staff of Prince 
E., because he was the mayor of the village, 
and our American friends recollect that he 
took charge of the food supplies. 

He also was carried away as a hostage, 
while his house rose from the earth and then 
subsided upon its old foundations. He was 
part of the baggage of the staff, borne off as 
wild beasts, chased out of their dens, drag 
their prey with them. Where was he ? No one 
knew, and the few old people who are still 
here spoke of his disappearance with a sort 
of terror. "They took him away," they say, 
and always with the same gesture, pointing 
to the road. One expected to have them make 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 223 

the sign of the cross, as if they had seen the 
devil and his angels. 

Nothing is so monotonous in nature or in 
life as that which is excessive; the heart and 
mind both become exhausted from gazing 
into an abyss. Here there was no varied and 
complex play of thought, no shade of mean- 
ing to be discovered; everywhere there was the 
same unchanging and funereal gesture of de- 
struction wherever old people, or men, or 
children have lived and loved and believed in 
life, drinking from its brimming cup gladly. 
Words failed before this barren repetition, 
and a dull amazement crept over mind and 
heart; thought stopped in confusion, and one 
despaired of humanity. 

They have written "Nicht aergern, nur 
wundern," and they are right, because for a 
moment our ideas of our divinely appointed 
destiny, of justice, and of an overruling Prov- 
idence withdraw behind the veils which hide 
the face of God. 

Here, outside the park, in the path leading 
to the public washing-place, was the tree 
against which the cure leaned and waited, 
with his eyes fixed upon his breviary, and 
with a calm countenance, the bullets which 



224 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

were to pierce his heart; his last breath mur- 
mured a prayer. 

And this was the road, between the fallen 
poplars, over which the women and young 
girls were driven, like some new sort of 
cattle, toward the German stables. As they 
started on the same day, at the same signal, 
the files of captives from different villages 
must often have met and recognized each 
other, as they had done before on holidays, 
on the feast of Saint John, for instance, when 
the people went, laughing and gossiping, 
from the hamlets to the market-towns, to 
sing at vespers and dance the bourree in the 
evening. 

For this part of the country Is not merely 
France, it is the oldest France of all, the Ile- 
de-France, where the joy of living found its 
highest expression. In labor and in love. No 
other soil on the earth has been kinder or 
more faithful to those who lived by It; no- 
where else have men so burst into song, as 
they have In this heart of our old life, amus- 
ing themselves by playing with villanelles, 
matching the rhymes of tiercets, and polish- 
ing the flowing lines of sonnets, to garland 
the beauty of French existence. The walls of 
our churches were a network of stone stretched 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 225 

between the sapphires and emeralds of their 
glowing windows; the passage of the centuries 
and the vicissitudes of the most cruel wars 
had left them untouched. Every house, every 
cottage, had its own air, its own look, its own 
expression of continuity; here there might be 
a dwelling with gables on the street, and 
muUioned windows, divided by graceful col- 
umns, and there a humble abode with rough- 
cast walls on a narrow alley, an old nest shel- 
tered by its old roof on the old soil. Every- 
where one found traces of the fine distinctions 
which our forebears, although living side by 
side, had been careful to establish, as mark- 
ing the shades of difference which gave life 
its variety. 

The haggard face of the moon, once veiled 
by branching trees, shone on a desert "as we 
picked our way through the ruins, and every 
now and then our feet would strike some 
fragment of sculpture, where our artisans had 
wrought a vine-leaf, a spray of bindweed, 
the sheath of a buttercup, or an acorn and 
the notched outline of the oak-leaf. If I picked 
up a bit of broken stone, the cold light showed 
me the careful and loving work of an old 
craftsman's hand. 

We dined underground, in the shelter which 



226 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

the German prince had taken pains to make 
comfortable. The old chairs of gilded wood 
and the ebony table were still there, and when 
the growling of the French cannon sounded 
too near, the prince and his staff took refuge 
here, twenty-six feet down. The earth of the 
floor and walls was hidden by round billets of 
birchwood, and Bible texts were scrawled in 
Gothic text on this wooden sheathing. A 
frieze, painted on unbleached linen, showed 
the classic German landscape; a wide river 
between hills and, perched on the crest of 
each hill, a town bristling with turrets and 
watch-towers. This was the lair into which^he 
beast retired to think out his plans of de- 
struction. 

The evening was a sad one. Our American 
friends, Morton and Rivards, had been here 
three months ago to distribute food, as the 
barges bringing it came up a canal between 
two bends of the Oise, not far away. The 
women waited their turns patiently at the 
communal depot, and then went off together, 
carrying their scanty bags of rice and coffee 
and little boxes of bacon and lard. They were 
still in prison, but a ray of hope had filtered 
in. They dared not speak to the Americans in 
words, but their faces, haggard with fasting 






WITH OUR FRIENDS 227 

and waiting, spoke for them when the rolling 
of the French guns passed over their heads. 
The enemy had no power to stop that ap- 
proaching thunder; lips might be forbidden 
to speak, but eyelids could not be sealed, and 
the women's eyes spoke and hoped. 

What an ignoble idea it was," said Morton, 
to carry off the women and girls ! I wonder 
what German head thought of it first ! It pro- 
fanes humanity!" he added gloomily. 

"It came from the frenzy of gamblers who 
had staked all they had upon what they 
thought was sure to win, and who found they 
had lost the game," said Rivards. "They were 
playing for the 'Zukunft,' a word to which 
they are much attached. The 'Zukunft,' the 
future — ^they had made a bargain with her, 
as they might have done with the devil; they 
sold their souls and the lives of a million and 
a half of their men, who lie here on the bor- 
ders and in the heart of France, and whose 
bones will mingle with the stones of the land 
they invaded. They invented cabalistic words, 
and offered them as fetiches to a fetich-loving 
nation. Ask any German with an ordinary 
education for the reason of this war, and he 
will answer Mie Zukunft,' as the ignorant 
soldier, turning his gray cap in his hands, 



228 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

will say Mer Kaiser/ There are also certain 
words to which they have given a force that 
is almost dynamic, by dressing them up with 
the prestige of religion. They say 'it is the 
word of Redemption, the "Losungs-Wort/" 
It is all very well for them to tell us that 
'theories are gray, and life a green tree'; they 
have stuffed themselves with gray theories, 
and it is here that the green tree will be 
planted. 

"They have a great many ideas, most of 
them false; they have a great deal of religion, 
but it has been perverted. Never have there 
been so many arguments as to the advisa- 
bility of putting more fertilizers around the 
green tree, never has there been so much cal- 
culation, ending in a hopeless tangle of figures, 
never has so much dogmatism made so many 
sophistries. They confess it when they speak 
of 'those delusions of life of which men can- 
not be deprived without depriving them also 
of life itself.' I have heard them say 'Truth is 
not in the light which illumines, but in the 
eye which sees'— and then they look through 
a glass which distorts everything; they have 
opticians who make the spectacles that you 
may behold on the noses of German soldiers. 
* Excelsior Gedanke' — ^they invoke the super- 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 229 

human thought of their superman, who calls 
upon them all the time to grow, as if they 
were some monster which would never stop. 
And in order to 'grow/ they hatch and turn 
out troops by the million, as much alike as a 
regiment of tin soldiers. They have taught 
falsehoods * useful to life,' and they have said: 
'We have reorganized the blind forces of 
nature; now it is for us to wield the thunder 
that will shake the world.'" 

It was late when we got back to Compiegne. 
The night was mild, with many stars, and 
the moonlight lingered on the ruined land- 
scape. We drove slowly, for fear of running 
into fallen trees, until at last we found our- 
selves again in the forest of Ourscamp, a liv- 
ing forest, with the wind rustling in its oaks 
and beeches, with delicate odors from its 
damp earth, and the throng of its tree-trunks 
still dimly to be seen in the shadows, upright, 
orderly, and numerous as armies. Armies . . . 
the word is ever in one's mind. 

* 

Two days later we stood on the deck of an 
ocean liner at Havre — the Espagne. Hoover 



230 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

was sailing for the United States; sovereign 
over wheat in his great repubhc, he was going 
to take possession of his kingdom. Two of his 
young delegates were going with him; others 
were beginning to organize the services of the 
American Red Cross, while others again were 
preparing to incorporate themselves into the 
first small nucleus of officers and men around 
whom the American army would gather. 

It was some weeks since Mrs. Vernon had 
left us, and we were beginning to receive her 
first letters. What a born missionary she was ! 
Even we ourselves, children of France though 
we were, felt that she was urging us to greater 
effort. 

*' France is the soul of the world,'* she said. 
*' Write to us, let us hear your voices; we are 
like Saint Thomas, we must see and feel as 
well as believe. Send us something of your 
true soul, of the fire whose sparks are in your 
soldiers and your peasants, and hidden on the 
hearths of your homes. It is from your torch 
that the mighty flame must be kindled which 
will sweep over all our land." 

So the little group was to be scattered, to 
undertake new tasks. We had come to say 
farewell, and as he walked up and down the 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 231 

ship's deck Hoover spread before us a com- 
prehensive view of what might be expected 
from the effort of the United States. 

Although this modern Moses had already 
demanded, obtained, and distributed manna 
to the people during a time of sore trial, I 
confess that we were still somewhat incased 
in incredulity, like the Hebrews of old. 

"You are mistaken," said Hoover (and he 
showed his impatient faith by walking faster). 
"I assure you that it will not be long. The 
movement which is now taking place among 
our people belongs to the order of moral and 
religious phenomena, the action of which, as 
you know, is instantaneous. Under other cir- 
cumstances, how shall I express it ? We should 
have had to go through a rotation of feelings 
before throwing our armies into Europe; we 
should have had to drag our men away from 
their settled faith in peace and accustom 
them gradually to the idea of war. You know 
it is one of your old writers who has said 
'Peace fills the mouth with honey.' But now 
an alarm has been given in the United States 
which has aroused our national conscience. 
Love for France has become a vital force in 
millions of brave young hearts. 



232 THE SOUL OF THE C. R. B. 

"An intolerable wrong is being committed 
in the world, and we cannot allow it. 

"It is true that we have neither the tradi- 
tions nor the habits of a military nation; we 
shall not feel the war in our body and our 
blood, but we shall feel it in our souls, and 
our action will be all the more rapid. 

"We have no warlike traditions nor habits," 
he repeated, and he added with one of his 
quick, thoughtful smiles: "I know you are 
thinking that, but, on the other hand, we 
have none of the old wheels which turn on 
themselves without going on. We shall profit 
by the lessons and also by the faults of every 
one . . . yes, of every one, and on the whole 
we shall turn out something new — something 
new founded on old methods, as we did in 
our beginning." 

He went back over what he had seen in the 
course of the war, and spoke of men whom he 
had known in Belgium and France, speaking 
of them with deep feeling. Some were hidden 
in jails or prison-camps, some had been shot 
to death as "traitors," because even in their 
agony they had been true to their country, 
and he added in a low voice, as if speaking to 
himself: 



WITH OUR FRIENDS 233 

"This war has become a religion, for it has 
had its martyrs." 

A bell rang; it was the signal for us who 
were not sailing to leave the ship. 

Two hours later we stood on the heights 
of Sainte Adresse and watched the steamer 
as she went down the channel, until the smoke 
from her funnels had faded against the sky. 



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